Valuetainment founder Patrick Bet-David jokingly points out: There’s only two people willing to give a 17-year-old a $100,000 loan. One is a loan shark. The other kinda sorta works for the government. Her name is Sallie Mae and she’ll hand out a student loan to pretty much anyone. Now think about that. The average 17-year-old has little to no work experience, no assets, no credit history, no money saved up. Is that someone who should be given 6-figures?
And why’s college cost so much anyway? Especially when you consider that the majority of private and public universities pay no taxes? But wait, clearly all the ticket sales from those packed football stadiums every Saturday get taxed, right? Yeeeah, no. Pretty much anything that makes a college or a university money, including their friggin’ investments, are tax exempt. Sponsorships, donations—they don’t even pay property taxes. So you charge outrageous tuition, the government funds your students, and after payroll, you keep every penny.
And then our tax money goes to these schools. Billions in, zero out. I mean, name a better business to be in. Then they invest their gargantuan profits into what are basically hedge funds called endowments that compound year after year. There’s enough money in these endowments to pay for every student’s tuition for like the next 120 years. But nooo, let’s bury these awkward, oily-faced teenagers in as much student loan debt as possible before they’re mature enough to understand what they just signed up for.
“Between the high monthly payments and the mounting default rate on student loans,” Patrick explains, “this is destroying young people’s credit ratings. It’s so much harder for them to buy cars, to buy a house, to move on, simply because of the payments they need to be making. The puppet masters behind all this know it’s not sustainable. They know they’re charging an arm and a leg, and dragging this [meaning, getting a degree] out 4, 5, 6 years. When it could be done in 18-months with a laptop and WiFi connection.”
Question from Patrick: When’s the last time you looked at a photo album? Probably been a while, hasn’t it? That’s because we got Instagram now. Technology makes everything faster and more efficient. Yet college, for some reason, takes longer and costs more. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! But that’s greed and politics for you. The families who donate the most money and the people who know people and wanna serve their self-interests are the ones who sit on the boards and call all the shots. It’s sickening.
But look, Patrick’s not anti-education. He’s not anti-learning. Quite the opposite. His beef isn’t with the educators and certainly not the educat-ed. It’s with the outdated, borderline-scammy traditional educational system. Patrick doesn’t have all the answers, but the status quo’s gotta go. One alternative for the business-minded is Valuetainment University. Where, for $99 a month, you can learn Advanced Business Strategy, Sales Systems, Public Speaking, and much much more.
More courses from other world-class experts will be added over time. Each course is 60-minutes and broken down into bite-sized lessons. There’s videos, worksheets, and action steps. If you take a course and don’t think it was worth your time, you can ask for a refund. And get this: Patrick created all this on his own dime, and he’ll even pax taxes on the revenue it brings in. I know, right? Crazy concept. It’ll be interesting to see what our kids’ kids do after high school. Will self-education be the norm by then? Can creators like Patrick Bet-David take on Goliath?
