Why You Should Quit College | Spotify Video Exclusive

Summary

The Game with Alex Hormozi

Episode: “Why You Should Quit College”

Spotify Video Exclusive, July 28, 2023

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Alex Hormozi directly addresses high school juniors, seniors, recent graduates, and anyone contemplating the future relevance of college. Drawing on personal anecdotes and logical frameworks, Alex unpacks the underlying reasons most people attend college, challenges societal expectations, and explores practical alternatives for building wealth and success outside conventional higher education. The episode is structured around a real-life case study—his neighbor Jacob—demonstrating a different path to early financial success, providing listeners a detailed look at decision-making, opportunity costs, and skill-based learning.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Societal Expectations and the Automatic College Path

Timestamp: 00:00 - 03:40

• Most people go to college because “it’s expected,” not out of a conscious, personal decision.
• “It's the same thing for having kids and getting married and buying a house. But let's not get into that.” (Alex, 00:45)
• Alex shares the story of Jacob, his 18-year-old neighbor, who enrolled in Pepperdine “just because it was expected,” only to realize after a semester that the path wasn’t a fit.

2. The Decision-Making Framework

Timestamp: 03:40 - 07:00

• Major life decisions should be assessed by their reversibility and long-term impact, not made on autopilot.
• “Choosing to go and commit four years of my life between 50 and $200,000 of money and the lost income that I would have made during that period of time. Those are very big irreversible decisions...” (Alex, 04:16)
• The real cost of college isn’t just tuition, but huge opportunity costs (lost income, lost alternative experience).

3. The Value of Degrees vs. Market Skills

Timestamp: 07:10 - 10:00

• Degrees often don’t teach directly marketable, income-generating skills.
• “Do you think your philosophy degree, your sociology degree, your psychology degree, your economics degree even… is going to give you actual skills to make money?” (Alex, 05:22)
• Asserts the curriculum should be aligned to direct business functions: marketing, sales, delivery, technical trades, and supporting services.
• “If Alex were redoing the education system, the majors would be in accordance to the departments of a business.” (Alex, 06:03)

4. Real-Life Application: Jacob’s Journey

Timestamp: 10:51 - 14:30

• Jacob, at age 20, after dropping out, is making $200k/year in sales and has $210k saved.
• Jacob credits a pivotal walk and conversation with Alex for helping him choose this path.
• Notable Quote:
  • Jacob: “The line that really hit… it's totally acceptable to fail at entrepreneurship because you're still in school and you're using it as a crutch… So I knew I needed to go home.” (Jacob, 12:09)
  • Alex: “You were using college as a social safety net to give yourself an excuse for why you weren't winning.” (Alex, 12:25)
• Jacob confirms that going “all in” after the walk changed his trajectory.

5. Addressing Socialization & The Myth of the “College Experience”

Timestamp: 07:50 - 09:10, 10:00 onward

• The common argument for college—social life—can be replaced by actively seeking social activities outside class, often for less money and with more real-world experience.
• “If the problem to be solved is to socialize you, there are way more efficient ways to socialize you than spending $200,000 and not making income.” (Alex, 08:38)

6. Skill Acquisition and Career Direction

Timestamp: 09:10 - 10:00, 13:00 onward

• Alex encourages focusing on acquiring skills (sales, marketing, delivery, finance, etc.) and experimenting to find what fits, rather than waiting for certainty.
• “You’re never going to know, because how would you know? You know by starting, and then you’ll gain context to make the decision later.” (Alex, 09:44)
• Learning by doing, pivoting when you’ve learned what you need from a branch.

7. The Importance of “Soft Skills”

Timestamp: 13:10 onward

• The most powerful skill to “bolt on” to any technical expertise is learning to deal with people: manage, lead, and influence.
• “It's how you gain influence. And you also realize that the technical thing that you're really good at is probably not the thing you’re going to be doing in the business.” (Alex, 13:32)

8. Parental Concerns and Reframing Education

Timestamp: 13:30 - 14:30

• Alex clarifies to parents: he isn’t anti-education, but pro-self-directed, practical learning tied to actual goals.
• “I’m not telling you not to get educated. I'm telling him to get super educated in the thing that he wants to do. The best people in the world at anything learn for themselves.” (Alex, 13:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Alex (On Social Pressure):
  “They make that decision, because their parents are telling them to, which seems like the overused one. But realistically, because they don’t want to be the kid who did it wrong… That’s a terrible reason to go to college.” (04:35)

• Alex (On Marketable Skills):
  “Ancient Chinese literature has never impacted my ability to make money. Aztec culture, don’t know anything about it, but it's classes.” (05:37)

• Alex (On Google's Hiring Practices):
  “Google stopped requiring college degree. Big tech corporations have stopped it because they realized… it’s not value additive.” (06:46)

• Jacob (On Decision Making):
  “You closed me very hard on that walk.” (11:56)

• Alex (On Learning by Doing):
  “Of course you will suck, too, because you haven’t done it. But how do you think you get good? You start by sucking, and then you suck less.” (12:48)

• Alex (On Self-Education):
  “The best people in the world at anything learn for themselves. They are self-taught. If you can adopt that mentality, then the world is your oyster.” (14:05)

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Segment Timestamps

• Societal Pressure and the College Default — 00:00–03:40
• Irreversibility & Opportunity Cost — 03:40–07:00
• Skills vs. Degrees & Business Functions as Majors — 07:10–10:00
• “The Walk” with Jacob & the Power of Going All-In — 10:51–14:30
• Parent Perspective & Real Education — 13:30–14:30

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Takeaways

• College is not a one-size-fits-all answer; making the choice requires honest analysis of costs (including lost opportunity), personal goals, and actual skill development.
• Practical business skills (sales, marketing, customer delivery, people management) are more directly correlated with market success than most academic degrees.
• Socialization and life experience can be achieved creatively and intentionally outside the college system.
• Self-directed education and action—starting early and learning by doing—can accelerate financial and personal growth.

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If this episode challenged your default assumptions about education, Alex recommends following up with his video on “how to analyze opportunities” for deeper frameworks on decision-making and exploring alternative life paths.

Transcript

[A]

This video is for every 17 year old, 16 year old, 18 year old, 19 year old who's considering going to college or quitting college right now. Should I spend the next four years going to college? Hopefully I can equip the parents and the kids to make a call with as little societal pressure as possible. When I lived in Austin, my next door neighbor was 18 years old. He was at this important decision, his life, where he was deciding whether he was going to go to college. And I knew his parents, and it's kind of interesting because I sit halfway between his parents and him, so I kind of have both sides. He decided to enroll at Pepperdine after a semester. He didn't really like it, and I think a lot of it was because it was just kind of expected that he go to college there. I had developed a rapport with him and, you know, he used to work out with me at my home gym after school and whatnot. And so I was like, hey man, let's go for a walk. And I think we walked for about an hour and we just walked around the neighborhood. And I'm pretty sure that that conversation significantly shifted the trajectory of his life. There we go. All right. The reason most people to go to college is because that is what's expected. They don't think about the decision, they just do it because it feels like the next natural path. It's the same thing for having kids and getting married and buying a house. But let's not get into that. He went from going to Pepperdine to dropping out. His friends, his family, his friends, parents started looking at him different. He was like the troubled child. He's like, I don't know about him. Two years later, he now has $250,000 saved up as a 20 year old, makes $200,000 a year right now as a sales guy, What I want to do is break down the split in the road of two different lives that he could have lived or that you could live, or that somebody that you know who's facing the decision could go through. And I'll tell you how the conversation I had with him went. What's up, man? So I said, listen, you're at a crossroads right now. We have crossroads every day in our lives. I was like, but some crossroads are bigger than others. And when you're trying to make a decision, you have to think, how reversible is this decision and how much long term impact is dev if I'm choosing between Chinese and Mexican for lunch, It's a split in the road and it's really not going to affect much for me down the road. Choosing to go and commit four years of my life between 50 and $200,000 of money and the lost income that I would have made during that period of time. Those are very big irreversible decisions and they need to be treated with the same amount of respect. And a lot of people don't because they make that decision, because their parents are telling them too, which seems like the overused one. But realistically, because they don't want to be the kid who did it wrong, who didn't do what they were supposed to do and didn't do the next natural step. That's a terrible reason to go to college. I would like you to approach it with a decision making framework that makes sense. So it starts with. And this is me telling him this. I was like, what problem are you solving? He's like, well, I want to make money. So the question is, four years from now, if you have a degree and you lost the money and you lost the earning potential you had during those four years, is that you more able to generate income than an alternative view? Because what we have to analyze is not the cost of college, but the opportunity cost of going to college. The opportunity cost is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. So when we choose to go to college, there's an opportunity cost that exists and it is the single greatest cost that people do not take into consideration. It's the cost of not doing of what you could have done in the meantime. One is it's going to cost you money because you actually got to spend money to do it. The second way it costs you money is that you're not going to earn what you probably could earn full time working if that's what you wanted to do. You got two sides there. If you spent four years versus starting a business and then four years later, the opportunity class is the business you could have started and what you would have four years later. So I'm walking with him and this is like a one hour really in depth. Like, this is probably deeper than he and I have been because I'm still this neighbor from across the street that like makes money on the Internet, right? But his parents, like trusted me enough to be like, you know, I know that you have a lot of influence over our son and like, we just want you to know that. Like, we know you do. And so like, please be careful. And I was like, I'm aware. He's in good hands. Don't be Afraid for what I'm going to tell your son. I was like, listen man, if you want to make money, then you need income generating skills. Do you think your philosophy degree, your sociology degree, your psychology degree, your economics degree even, which is still a little more useful, is going to give you actual skills to make money? He was like, I don't know. And so I'm here to tell you what actually makes money. There's this lie that has been sold that you need to learn general education. I can tell you ancient Chinese literature has never impacted my ability to make money. Aztec culture don't know anything about it, but it's classes. And they somehow fool kids into thinking that if they take this class, they're now somehow going to be more equipped to add value to the marketplace. If Alex were redoing the education system, the majors would be in accordance to the departments of a business. You'd have marketing and it would have the actual ways to market, which is creating the materials of marketing and then how to distribute it. You'd have sales, how to get strangers to give you money delivery portion, which would be either physical products delivery or services delivery, which would be customer experience, customer success, or it'd be technical, electrician, plumber, lawnmower, whatever it is. So then you have the actual technical component of the services delivered and then you have the supporting services, which are like finance, hr, legal. Those would be the things that people should major in because those are the things that you're going to get hired to do. Google stopped requiring college degree. Big tech corporations have stopped it because they realized it too, that it's not value additive. If I'm a doctor or a lawyer, you need a degree, sure. But for the 99% of people who don't fall into six fucking careers that you have to have one. People like Alex, you went to Vanderbilt. I graduated a year early, so I tried to get out as fast as I possibly could. One of the regrets that I have is that I could have started sooner. And the reason why I didn't drop out of college is because I was too, too shit scared to disappoint my father. If you're gonna do it eventually, you might as well do it now. When I see the guys who are starting at 18, I'm like, man, I wish I had started then rather than 23. I would have 5 more years zooming back out. I'm walking the street, we're talking together and I told him this line. I said, the world doesn't need another three. One business degree from Pepperdine Another B student who graduates because he didn't really give a shit, right? He would just do good enough that he would get through. And this is what he brought up. He's like, but what about like the social experience of college? I was like, so do you think that if you don't go to college, you're not going to be able to party with people who are your age? I was like, real talk. And he was like, well, like kind of. If the problem to be solved is to socialize you, there are way more efficient ways to socialize you than spending $200,000 and not making income. You can work all day and then make my objective for this period of time to have fun, then fucking work all day and then literally go out every single night and you'll end up debt free with savings and have a hell of a crazy four stories. And that's fine if that's what you want to do. I was like, is that what you want to do? He's like, no. And I think at some point in the conversation, he's like, oh, I kind of want to do what you do. And I was like, well, then you got to learn the skills that I had to start fucking five years older than you to start learning, right? And the first thing was you had to learn how to sell. Let's just go down that path. If you're watching this and you're like, well, I don't like sales. I told you all the other departments that you could focus on. If you're like, you know what? I like being behind a camera, then cool. What do you think behind a camera means in a business? Behind a camera means you're making content, you're making commercials. Pick one. That's what video is used for, right? If you're like, I like writing words. What do you think writing words are used for in business? They're used to sell shit or deliver shit. That's it. Or legal to protect people from selling and delivering shit. I like dealing with people. It's like, well, it depends. Are you a little bit more aggressive? You might like sales if you're a little bit more passive. Ish. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. You might like more of like the HR or you might like recruiting. You might like selling people rather than selling products. Different ways of thinking about it. And so you can take your skills and then bucket them into which of these departments make more sense. And then that's what I'm going to focus on, zooming back out. So I said, now we need to look at your three one degree, $200,000 of debt four years later versus four years from now. You're going to have saved money this whole period of time. So he's living with four guys. Because I was like, dude, you're living cheap. That's how this works. So he saves a lot of money, which is why he has $250,000 saved up at 20. That's not from Alex doing anything. Like, he worked for it. He worked for it, and he saved every dollar that he made. And what do you think he's going to be able to do in four years? He's going to be able to start his own thing with a ton of capital and skills. As we're walking through these four years, what do we think happens now? He's like, I really like sales. Now. He happened to have liked sales. The blessing that he got was he had a mentor, which obviously was me. I could see his personality. I was like, dude, I think you do well here. And he did. Like, he did well. But if he was that camera guy and he really liked more of that stuff, or if he was really techy, I would have been like, d, go start coding. And so all of, like, you have this base skill, and it's like, where do I want to apply it? If you're like, I don't know. You're never going to know, because how would you know? You know by starting, and then you'll gain context to make the decision later. All you know is the experiences you have. And so all you have to do is just always look around every so often, be like, have I learned everything that I'm going to learn from this branch? And if you've learned everything you're going to learn, then at that point, you can make the pivot, right? But if you're like, dude, there's still a lot for me to learn. Do I want to learn that? Is it the direction I want to keep going? I remember when I did my first years of consulting, I looked down the road 25 years, and I was like, I don't want that life. This is a hack that I will give you for very big decisions, is that you want to keep thinking on it, keep chewing on it, keep digesting it, until you can get into a single statement, which is, for him, four years from now, given the cost, which of these two paths will give me the most potential for my future? And he was like, well, I think the other one. And I was like, then what are you gonna do? So he decided to drop out. And he ended up going to sales. And he was terrified. In the beginning, he sucked at sales because he had never done it before. Of course he would suck. And of course you will suck, too, because you haven't done it. But how do you think you get good? You start by sucking, and then you suck less. That's how it works till eventually you look back after hundreds and hundreds and thousand repetitions, and you're like, oh, I'm actually pretty good at this. And it's reasonable that you'd be good because you've done it a thousand fucking times. He likes sales. It's probably going to be the direction that he takes directionally in his life. He's like, what do I need to learn now? So I was like, okay, how do you move up? He's like, I can start a business. I was like, yeah. I was like, what are you going to. What skills are you going to need to start a business? I got to know how to market. I was like, well, you already learned how to cold call. Like, that's your first acquisition channels. We got that handle, which is why I put him there. He's like, okay, so I have that so I can get customers, all right? And I know how to sell. So I got that. I was like, what are you going to deliver? It's like, well, I really do like teaching sales. I was like, well, who the fuck have you taught sales to? He's like, I guess I haven't. And I was like, sounds like a skill you need to have. He's got to learn the skill of how to transfer a skill from himself to somebody else. What are the other skills he's going to have to learn? Well, he's going to have to learn how to do finances. He's going to have to get contracts set up so he can have services, agreements, things like that. But again, these are all googleable things that you can do. You can figure those things out in a couple of days. It's not a big deal for the parents who are watching and the kids who are watching this at home are trying to make. The decision is, do I think that four years from now, with 50 to $200,000 in absolute cost and probably higher than that in opportunity costs of the cost of the path not taken, which of these two paths will lead me closer to where I want to go? And if the goal is to make income, then you have to look at that $200,000 and all the things you could buy with that $200,000 in four years of time and think, is there another way that I could reverse engineer four years to get me to where I want to go? Or if you just really like the technical expertise that you have, you go super deep on the technical expertise and then you bolt on one additional skill. This is the one skill I will give you that you need to bolt on to instantly give yourself the lift in whatever career you have. You got to learn how to deal with people. People gotta learn how to manage, gotta learn how to lead. You're like, that sounds like the soft, tough. And it is. But it's also how you're gonna get promoted. It's how you get respect. It's how you gain influence. And you also realize that the technical thing that you're really good at is probably not the thing you're going to be doing in the business. You just got to know it well enough to teach it to somebody else. His parents came to me after, like I talked to him and they're like, alex, can you please just sell me again on why he should be. You're like telling him to, to quit college. I was like, I'm not telling him to quit college. I'm telling him to make the best decision for where he wants to be in four years. I'm not telling you not to get educated. I'm telling him to get super educated in the thing that he wants to do. The best people in the world at anything learn for themselves. They are self taught. If you can adopt that mentality, then the world is your oyster because you realize that you can learn whatever you want whenever you want. You don't need a certification or permission to do that. Which of these paths four years from now, given the opportunity cost, is going to get me furthest towards my goal? Here we go. All right. Sup man?

[B]

What's up? What's up?

[A]

So I was responding to the comments that you had that they didn't think that you were real. So this is to my YouTube audience to know that Jacob is indeed a real person. Can you confirm that you lived as my neighbor next to my house and that we did work out every day after school?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And then how old are you now?

[B]

I am 20.

[A]

Still can't drink yet. Tough life. So you're in sales now, right? What are you making right now?

[B]

I probably hit 250. I had 113 the first six months of this and I'm already on track. I'm already ahead of that.

[A]

Nice to be king. And then how much money you have saved up?

[B]

210.

[A]

210. Okay. So over. I thought this. Thought it was 250. I got the 250 mixed up. So it's 210. What would you say has been the, like, the biggest mental mind shift change etc, from. From our talks and our chats.

[B]

That's a good question.

[A]

Well, you decided not to go to college, right? Is that the walk that did it?

[B]

That's the walk that closed it. You closed me very hard on that walk.

[A]

I did go really aggressive on that walk, to be fair. So you had now at that point, been in school for a semester. What was the reason you decided to take that jump?

[B]

I think the line that really hit when you said, and I'm paraphrasing it, it's totally acceptable to fail at entrepreneurship because you're still in school and you're using it as a crutch. I think that that's just like, oh, that's it. So I knew I needed to go home.

[A]

Yeah. So because you were dabbling on the side and you weren't succeeding at the entrepreneur thing, which is what you really wanted to do, and you were using college as a social safety net to give yourself an excuse for why you weren't winning.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And so then you decided to go all in on it.

[B]

Then we went all in. We did it.

[A]

All right. Say hi to Mosey. You're in the close. Say hi to Mosey nation. So that is to confirm that Jacob is indeed a real person with a real pulse and a real story. And if it worked for him, it could work for you. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you. Go back to sales calls. Jacob was lucky as hell that he just happened to have been my neighbor. That's right, Jake. I could just tell that he was incredibly hungry. I knew that he had this really deep desire to prove himself. When I see something like that, I'm like, cool. Like. And the way I tested that, I was like, show up after school every day. We'll work out. And I wanted to see if he would show up. And like clockwork, no matter what, every day he would text me wasn't like me having to text him or remind him. I knew that he had that desire, and he would take as much as I was willing to give. If this video caused you to question a couple things or maybe even brought up more questions than it did answers, because it opened up your mind to some things. What I'd recommend doing is watching this video, my video about how to analyze opportunities. And so if you're looking at, okay, maybe I don't do college, but what path do I go on that will give you the framework to make the decision on how you analyze opportunity in your life and a business that you might potentially start, etc.