Episode 8
Skip The Degree! Save The Tuition! with Julia McCoy & Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang
Skip The Degree, Save The Tuition - the book
If you've ever thought you've spent way too much money on your college degree and you have tons of bills for your education, have we got a deal for you! Julia McCoy and Dr. Addison-Zhang have came out with an amazing new book: "Skip The Degree, Save The Tuition." They'll show you how literally anyone today can start at a very high paying lucrative career in the digital market.
Their stories of growth and resilience throughout the process is something you do not want to miss!
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Full Episode Transcript:
Skip The Degree, Save The Tuition With Julia McCoy & Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang
If you've ever thought you've spent way too much money on your college degree, and you have tons of bills for your education. Have we got a deal for you? Julia McCoy and Dr. Addison Zang have come out with an amazing new book. Skip the degree, save the tuition. They've let us know how literally any one today can start at a very high paying lucrative career in the digital market.
Industry. And on this episode of Dealcasters, casters, not only do Julia and Dr. I tell you about the journey of creating this book and the 50 entrepreneurs that contributed, but they also talk about their fantastic journey throughout the show. So, we hope you enjoy it. Ladies, first of all, it is women's history month.
Yesterday was international women's day. Thank you so much for joining us today. Couldn't be happier than to have two amazing women that are setting great examples. I know for my daughters of what you can do with your life, if you put your mind to it. Thank you so much such a great introduction, Jim and Chris, we love you guys.
We love being on your show. First of all, this is the first time we're live on Amazon, right doctor.
This just came out. I'm sorry, this just launched February 10th of this year. And it's been a number one new release for about three weeks, which actually has never happened. This is my fourth book. My first one was a coauthor, Dr. I, who is amazing to partner up with and write this book. My story is really crazy just as Jim was hinting out there with a good cliffhanger.
I grew up in Pennsylvania and a fundamentalist Colt. And if you guys have ever watched the Handmaid's tale, that is the cult that I grew up in. I grew up in that religious system. So, I stopped in the middle of the night at 21 years old. It was literally me packing up my car and saying, I have to get out of here to survive and create a life that I'm going to enjoy living.
So, at 21, I was doing things like watching Netflix for the first time, all the normal things most people do, I was experiencing for the first time. And I had this drive in me that I just kind of picked up and followed and it was my passion and that all stemmed from writing and words, because words were my alternate reality.
When I grew up, there was a lot of trauma, as you can imagine, if you're familiar with the Handmaid's tale, there, a lot of trauma inside of her Colt. And my alternate reality was through words and stories. I would create stories, I would read stories, and that was how I lived. So incidentally, and this is true for a lot of authors that are very well known today.
Like J K Rowling, Tony Robbins. They had trauma early on and that pushed them towards their passions sooner than other people. So, I wouldn't say that's a benefit. You don't want to grow up with drama, but. That's what happened. I found my passion for writing very early on and I just flung myself in and I was like, what have I got to lose?
Literally nothing. Cause I have nothing else. So, I Google search when I was 19, how to make money writing online. And within three months after doing that Google search, I built express writers. And I was like, let me see if this can last, let me just try it. And today 10 years later, we're about to hit our 40000th project and we have almost a hundred people on staff.
I still get goosebumps saying that, but that is like that. That's why we wrote this book. Let's skip the degree, save tuition because what Dr. I, and I both believe is that you can create something mega successful without a degree without all those accusations, without that piece of paper. If you're following your passion, you can create something beautiful out of literally nothing stemming from your passion.
And that's why I had to write this book as I cross your 10. I was like, we now hire so many people and we see a repeated pattern of degrees, just not matching up to the real world. And I wasn't going to write this book because it was quite the undertaking. I wasn't going to write it. So maybe 20, 22.
And then I realized, like we couldn't hire people. It was getting really bad, and people were relying on their decrees. And the harsh reality was, if you go through college, you get a degree. You don't know how to write online content. Like you just don't. In fact, you have to unlearn that AP English style.
So, I was like, we have to do something about this, and those types of things keep me up at night. So that's why we wrote the book. And my story about escaping the cold, I wrote a book called woman rising. If that's something you're watching and you want more on that whole story, which is really crazy.
And we won't live there today. This is about the new book we just launched. You mentioned that in universities, you don't learn how to write online content. Can you elaborate on that? Unwrap that and just exactly what does that mean for someone who's thinking about writing and wants to write online content and AR is thinking about getting a degree in what exactly does it mean that they don't really, you don't really learn how to write online content?
Yes. Great question. There are several ways we could answer this. I'll share a couple points. Elon Musk has said recently. He's actually talked about online writing. It's funny, he's talked about the degree that you don't need it. And now he's talking about writing and he's saying compare it like this, a five-page essay is actually going to turn an online reader off.
Because you have to catch their attention in three seconds. That is the time span now. So, what we were taught, and AP English is the opposite of what an online reader actually is looking for. They're not, you're going to get an a, for a long-drawn-out paper. And that is just not the real world of online content.
It couldn't be further from reality because you need to learn how to write brief. Catchy engaging content to pull in that reader and then make sales happen, make engagement happen. So, it's almost like an alternate. Reality is still happening in our universities where; I can't hire people and we're on that side where we are paying 30,000 every two weeks for the people we hire.
I have to tell them the harsh truth and it is not, it's not easy, but that is the world that we're in this digital space. If you don't know how to write for this specific online market, you can't even it's really hard to get a job and keep it in the digital sphere. This is like mic drop stuff already.
We haven't even got to Dr. I, we didn't grow up that way. Chris? We're a little bit older, right? We could probably be a. Julia's a parent. We won't go there. But yeah, Jim, I know I'm getting up there in age, but let's hear from a doctor I a little bit about her story and where she got there.
Cause now mind you folks. We do. You heard what? I just called her, a doctor. I, she has a PhD. In a higher education. And so, for her to be writing this book with Julia says something. So, Dr. I flourish. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Chris and Jim for having us on the show, I'm really honored. I live onto a flop before I share my story.
I wanted to follow up on what Julia mentioned, because I do work with those college age high school students. I'm actually working with a group of high school students. A group of college aged students did right now. They have absolutely no idea how to draft for social media, like draft the content before social media at all.
And when I was reviewing their content is like a paragraph, another paragraph, like long sentences. And nobody talks like that. Like on social media nobody talks like that. And you set that for me, I think I, my PhD from New York, South, Maryland, and after I got my degree, I realized that if I needed to embrace the online space, I had to unlock so much on one thing that I had to earn was writing for an online artist.
And I learned from Julia from some other online creators. I was like, wow. I wish I had learned that when I was a student. So that's something I want to follow up based on what Julia mentioned. So, here's my story. I grew up in China, first generation immigrant. And I came to the U S because I hated Chinese education system.
It was only about regurgitating. Memorization public humiliation, like very intense pressure to compete. And I did a really well throughout my K-12. I was like a really good student, but internally I was paralyzed. I hated my life. I hated my parents. I hated my friends. I hated my school. There's so much anger and hatred in me that I developed a really bad.
Eating these older for three years. So, while I was a high school student. So that's what inspired me to coach to a different country to explore how other people actually learn. And I discover that if you come to the us to study will actually pay you a scholarship. Which was amazing to me. I was like, wow.
So, I came to the U S I got my master from Syracuse and I got my PhD from New York, South, Maryland, and starting teaching. What I started to notice a few years into my teaching career was that wow. The U S education has many issues that I was dealing ways. Why was the kid in China? I started to see like patterns and parallels.
And to make a long story short. And finally, I came to this point, I asked myself, am I since like part of the problem to continue to perpetuate this broken education model? Or do I want to be part of the solution to create a new model? And as a crazy person as I am. So, I decided to choose the second option.
So that's how I cannot resign from my associate professor position. I started building. Classroom or without was where we really work hard to teach our students what schools are not teaching them to become future ready and a career ID. And I have so much data, so many examples to back backup the broker education model.
And I see that in my students all the time, Juliet talks about how students. They don't know how to write online. Also in my case, my background is in communication and after students took so many communication courses, they had no idea how to communicate. That was another aha moment for me to realize, wow, learning in the hat, learning from a bug is so different from learning in real life.
Unless, you know how to apply everything here and translate that into real life. You haven't learned anything. The most, the teachers are doing what they know they need to do to perpetuate this broken model. So, I'm so proud of myself as it was so honored to partner up with Julia. I know she's a cottage who dropout.
I'm a professor job holiday to work on Facebook. To show other people and alternative where they can have more impact in life. That's amazing. And I think when you go to school, where'd you go to university when you work for that degree and you want to get into the tech space or you want to get into writing social media, everything changes every second, every minute.
And of course, I'd like to consider myself a lifelong learner. I know Jim feels the same way. You probably feel the same way. And if you're. If you're wanting to learn stuff about tech, wanting to learn stuff about social media, you have to every day there's something new to learn. And so, getting a degree is only just a stop in the road necessarily you have to continue to learn.
So how do you work with work with someone to, to help them unlearn that, that whole concept and that they need to get these accreditations? In order to get those types of jobs, Julia, or doctor I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Share some quick examples. Juliet park. Just like what I learned, what I noticed that the younger, the kid, the easier it is to unlearn, rewire their brain, the older they are, the more damage that you'll have to undo.
And that's something I noticed. I'm just like some studies. They said one study was conducted by NASA, so they won't eat to study creativity. So, what they discovered is that the ask kids, how many ways can you think of using a paper clip? So, for the four years old, five years old age group, they generate hundreds of ideas.
So, they scored 98% in terms of creativity. So, they're a genius level. Five years later, they ask the same group of people and the number of jobs from Nike 8% to 15%. It's huh? And another five years later as they become older, no professional is working, graduated from college, the number of jobs to 2%.
So, what happened between 98% to 2% is because they become a more educated. Which is pretty sad. Think about how much time, how much money, that way you invest in the cake. And then now we are having that. This is actually hurting you, to really help you. So, the older you are, at least based on my observation, the longer it takes to unload that process.
Yeah, I totally agree with all of that. And it's interesting. And this is one reason I love that I was able to pair up with Dr. I on this project is I have this perspective of hiring and firing for 10 years. We've had to tell people the brutal truth, whether they liked it, or we liked it because it was a paying client that was either going to stay or leave.
And then Dr. IES has the education perspective of living in the classroom and seeing the issues firsthand. And, what we see, I hate to say is a lot of times the more degrees, the more entitlements and the less willingness to learn new things. And we actually have people that tell us, they've attached their diploma as a PDF.
And they're like I have this master's degree, so I don't need to take your, and we've built like free training inside of our writing team. We've made it so accessible. That was one of our goals where three years ago, were we. Decided to start assigning our senior editor to new writers, like everything we could possibly do to help these people really get a chance once they were in our team to stay in our seat because we have some highly paid writers.
And what we saw is people with more degrees were so unwilling to learn. And it was just like the entitlement thing it's attached to that piece of paper. That to us meant absolutely nothing because that piece of paper to it means skills. All we want to see, and that is literally our interview process.
How well can you write, show us, write something and try to stop me. Yeah. And they're like I've always decreased. I don't need to do that. Like ESE. Do we can't hire you other the other than seeing your actual skills. So that's, that's the harsh truth being in the employment world where we're hiring people based on their skills and the good news.
The good side of all of that is, especially I think for parents. Hear this and see doctor I, and I that are out here trying to make a difference, busting our fingers off to launch this book earlier than we planned on is, if you give this book to a kid that is thinking about digital skills, not necessarily, you can't be a heart surgeon and read this book sorry, we have to get that degree.
But if you're thinking about being a social media manager, being a content marketing specialist, A content strategist, a freelance writer, that list goes on and on. And in fact, we have over 50 things you can do in the book. I think it's in chapter three 50 different positions you can do without a degree just learning a skill.
So, the good thing is that we now have the spoke available and it is a tool like everyone watching use it, share it. Because inside, like we have given the keys to the castle on how to build a skill set that will make you money. This is your fourth book, right? Julia is, am I right? Okay. But it's this one's different.
You have like when I got to the point where I saw the number of contributors for this book, I was absolutely floored. by the. The quantity, but the quality, can you talk a little bit and let people know, just, the contributions of, and the names of some of these please name drop galore.
Cause it's going to be very easy to do. I'd love to, I'd love to hear about how you got so many great people to be able to be a part of it. Yes. So, we saw that this started to become. I think Dr. I, you put it best. What is the phrase you use? Yes, we really see this as a movement. Yeah. So, we saw that began to happen as we started.
We built this website, you saved the tuition.com. It ranks number one for the keyword, skip the degree and all of that, super nerdy content stuff that I just love. But whenever we started building all of these content pieces around the book and we started talking about it. And we started asking for stories.
We got more than we could handle. We actually had to restructure how we were going to publish the stories. And now they all live on the website, say the tuition.com. And we have a short summary of each story in the book. But entrepreneurs began to see this, and some pretty big names were cheering us on Seth Godin was one of those people.
And I have Dr. Ida, thank for that because she invited him on her show and that's how he learned about us. And he thanked us for our leadership and our contribution to society. And I was like, okay, my career has done sign off. Now this is Seth Goden think does. And we had Neil Patel contribute...
