Secrets to Graduating College Without the Debt Trap w/Kuni Beasley

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 0:00

Tired, weary, frustrated. What would you be doing if you weren't raising children alone? What's stopping you from living your best life? Now, on Solo Mom's talk, I discuss with Solo Mothers the challenges you face raising children alone. So if you're a working Solo Mom dealing with independent children, insensitive bosses, weight and health issues or even debt collectors, join us as we discover your path to get and stay healthy, increase your income and live with joy and purpose. Kuni Beasley went to school for 22 years but only paid for one semester. He now teaches families how to do the same. Welcome, Kuni.

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 1:09

Thank you. Thank you, Jen, Thank you for having me.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 1:12

Yes, for sure. Before we get into this huge conversation, can you tell us who is Kuni Beasley?

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 1:23

Well, let's see. I was born in Japan. My mom was Japanese. My father was an American GI. They got married a little after the Korean War came to the States. I attended both government schools from the military and public schools. Let's see. For high school I went to the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, texas. I got a full scholarship to college. After college I entered the Army, spent seven and a half years in active duty. At one time I was the youngest commander in Europe. I commanded a nuclear artillery unit when I was 23 years old. I worked in corporate America, first at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas and then later on with Caltech Petroleum as international management consultant, wrote my dissertation on the Federal Reserve. I backed up a little bit. I got my master's degree while I was on active duty, going to school at night Kind of a record. I did it in 10 months. I'll say 10 months, 50 weeks. Then I was working on my PhD. I wrote my dissertation on the Federal Reserve Bank In the middle there. Between the time I started my PhD and ended my PhD, I went to seminary for two years and picked up a degree in Greek and Hebrew. Academically, I tell people I mean my bachelor's degree is in criminal justice. I've never busted anybody or written a parking ticket. My first doctorate is in Greek and Hebrew. Nobody's asked me to be their rabbi. My second one is in urban and public administration. Nobody's asked me to be their mayor. So academically I'm a failure. I did manage to go to college all those years and only pay for one semester. So 22 years. In that process I began to work with people. Actually, if we go back to about 1979, the Army asked me to do some research on how we could get soldiers into college, get college credit. I began to look at ways of gaining college credit and doing it inexpensively, that kind of snowballed, until I started having my kids getting ready for college. I hadn't saved anything up for college. I tried to figure out how to do it. I didn't think I could figure out how to do it and I did. First daughter went to college, ended up getting a little bit more than a full scholarship when I say a little bit more than full scholarship, when all of the scholarships and funding all cleared, for her first semester they sent us a check for $1,500. We ended up doing that. That has happened a lot with our kids and even my wife going to college that we've actually gotten more money back than it cost to go in some case Not always. Sometimes we had to pay a little bit in, but there are strategies you can use to reduce the impact of the cost of college. We've helped people go to Harvard, Cornell, Berkeley, MIT the big schools and plus the little schools. Nothing wrong with the little schools or the less higher-profile schools. A lot of people try to put a lot of emphasis on wanting to go to a high-profile, expensive school. Part of the things that we have to do is, when we start talking with parents, we end the students. We have to deprogram them because they think that you have to go to a very high-profile school to be successful. There's plenty of successful people who didn't go to high-profile schools or that you have to go to college at all. About 20% of the people I work with. I give them an alternate route instead of college, because college is not necessarily for everyone. There are plenty of jobs out there that make very good incomes, that you don't have to go to college. There are a lot of people with college degrees waiting tables. College in and of itself is not a path of success, but it does help. It comes down to being able to do the work. My emphasis is primarily doing the right work the right way at the right time. Like I tell my students during the summer, you've got to do something during the summer. Here's a list of things you should be doing, because if you don't work during the summer, you're going to work for somebody who did. There's just ways of gaining advantage. That's what I tell people. I set them up a strategy and say if you want to significantly reduce the cost of going to college, follow this strategy and you're not going to be in debt the rest of your life. There we are.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 5:45

Thank you for sharing your life with us. I appreciate it. Before we go on, I'll cut this out. You said something. You work for the Federal Reserve. Did you know Peter Hooper?

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 5:59

Peter Hooper? No, I left the Federal Reserve in 1991.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 6:09

I don't know if he was there, he was there, he probably was. Okay, that's fine, all right, sorry.

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 6:18

Cut this short.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 6:21

Okay, you mentioned that not everybody needs to go to college. Why? Why is that? Because we tell our kids I mean, I did it, you have to go to college. I desperately wanted to go to college when I came to the US. Why don't we all need to go to college?

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 6:45

Well, you don't necessarily have to go to college. Most plumbers, electricians, home builders, salespeople, they don't need to go to college. I mean it's nice that they go. In our family we had girl boy, boy girl. Both girls got scholarships to college. Both boys I put in the Army. So you know, there's just. I mean there's plenty of people that need to learn how to operate a forklift. Forklift operators make six figures in some places. You know Most of your plumbing businesses, people who run plumbing businesses. After 10 years. A plumber who develops a plumbing business after 10 years will be making more than a family practice doctor will. Okay, so, there's a flip side to this.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 7:33

Yeah.

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 7:34

Some people say they don't need to go to college and they'll say, well, bill Gates didn't go to college and Steven Jobs didn't go to college. And I go okay, you're right, they didn't go to college. Can we go to your garage and look at your Apple computer? Did you build one in your garage? Okay, and that's you know. And yeah, that's fine, I mean, but does everybody need to go to college? Not necessarily I do. I follow a lot of philosophy of micro from Dirty Jobs. He actually has a program to help people get into one of the trades. In fact, one of my grandnephews went through one of his programs to go into a trade. There's nothing wrong with trades. I mean, you got to have them. I mean, you don't need PhD auto mechanics, you need guys who can fix your car. A lot of people entrepreneur. And I go back to my mother. My mother couldn't read or write English. She died a millionaire, and so it's. You know there's a lot more of it has to do with grit than has to do with education, although if you're going to be an engineer, you're going to need to go to college. You're going to be a teacher going to go to college, but you don't need to be. You don't need to go to college. You're going to be an entrepreneur A lot of, plenty of entrepreneurs out there who didn't go to college. You'll who will go out and hire college trained accountants, college trained, college trained. But again, you know, for example, people are in the IT industry. They don't need to go to college. Most of the stuff that they learn, they learn on their own.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 8:58

That's interesting, isn't it?

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 9:00

And we're seeing society in the business starting to move away from requiring people to have degrees Now. On the other hand, if somebody needs a degree quickly to break the glass ceiling, then you know we have. I show them this is an easy way to get a degree quickly and very inexpensively, because a lot of times they're not asking for a specific degree, they just want you to have a degree.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 9:22

Right.

Dr. Kuni Beasley: 9:23

I mean again, I worked at the Federal Reserve Bank with a degree in criminal justice, so and then. But the ironic thing was is that the two major corporate jobs I had I was hired for what I did in the Army, not what I, but not for my education, because I was. My specialty was training and the Federal Reserve initially hired me as a trainer and then when I went to Caltechs I was into doing international management development training. So I primarily was hired because of what I did in the Army and most of the stuff I've developed, most of them, in fact, I'm moving right now. So I have programs and stuff sitting behind me here. Those are DVD cases, those are the programs I've written over the last 20 years different training programs, different books, everything from how to pass the college boards to how to get into a military academy, to how to write book reports. So I've developed a lot of writing on how to do these things. But when it gets down to, most people want to come to me and say you know, how do you get, how can my kid get in the college without us forfeiting our retirement or mortgaging our house again? Which? by the way most of the people around here who call themselves college something. Their target is to get you to refinance your house or to tap into your retirement to pay for college, and you should never have to do that. There is no college in the country that's worth doing that. The colleges may think that way, but there's no college in the country that's going to think that way. I mean, going to a high profile college is no guarantee of success. Well, let me just ask you a question Do you have a family position?

I do yes.

Okay, dentist.

Yes.

Okay, did you pick them based on where they went to college? No, you know where they went to college? No, okay, so you got two professions where their education is a critical factor. Yeah, it didn't factor in your decision to take them on. No, two of my doctors one got his medical degree in China and the other one in Vietnam, and I think that's why a lot of the people who are coming into practice in the United States have their degrees from overseas. In fact, a couple of years ago, the college had had the highest first-time pass rate on the medical boards was St George's in Grenada. So a lot of the prevailing thoughts about what people think about college are incorrect. Yes, and I think that's why I picked them, because a lot of them is based on what their friends say or what they you know. Here's the lead on, I guess, is I've always heard that, or someone told me, or I always thought that, and that means I'm going to get a myth or a fairy tale. Okay, because even when parents reflect upon their own college days, the college they went to doesn't exist anymore. The buildings may still be there, but the entire atmosphere of that campus is different. I mean, you can't even reflect on what you did in college. The whole funding process is completely changed, yet there is more money, even accounting for inflation, more money available today for college, that money you don't have to pay for, you know payback, you know I mean I'm talking about grants and entitlements and scholarships and those kinds of things. There's more of that available today than there was 30 years ago, you just kind of know where it is, but most people don't know. Most of your high school counselors they don't know because it's really not their job to know, it's their job to get the kids out the door in May. So a lot of people out there, there are a lot of people out there who think they know and they don't. And there are some people who are in the quote-unquote college funding business who, most of them, sell financial services, and so even among counselors in high schools, I mean I used to give a presentation every year at the Texas High School Counselors' annual meeting and I stopped about six years ago because they didn't invite me back. Because one time I had 40 of them in a room, half of them had doctoral degrees in counseling and I asked a simple question named the Ivy League colleges and there was a lot of jabbering going on and it wasn't until one of the ladies in the room Googled it on her phone that we get the correct list.

Wow.

Jen, you want to try that. What are the Ivy League colleges?

Yale, princeton Harvard. Princeton Harvard Is MIT one I don't know. This is wrong answers over here. Okay, so Yale, Princeton Harvard. That's why I'm stuck.

Okay, all right, most people will say Stanford or Duke or Berkeley, okay, here's how you remember it. Okay, bccd and happy. Take out the. A BCCD HPPY. Brown, cornell, columbia, dartmouth, harvard.

Princeton.

Penn, yale. Now the next question is what is the Ivy League? I mean, is it just an organization of very high-profile elite colleges that they join together and says we're going to have our own country club league here? What is the Ivy League?

I don't know that, I don't know.

The Ivy League is an athletic association.

Oh boy.

They play each other in football and badminton. La Crosse, it's an athletic association. That's why people say Stanford, well, stanford couldn't be any Ivy League, they wouldn't be able to go to the Rose Bowl, and so it's an athletic association. And they are not necessarily the best colleges in the country. They're good colleges. I mean Harvard certainly is a good college. Cornell, for instance I mean Princeton came out on some recent lists as being the top one in the country. But when you look at the top 10, most of the Ivy, you may have four of the Ivy League colleges in the top 10, then there will be several other colleges that people have never heard of that will be in the top 10. And it depends on whose list you're looking at, because they use different criteria. So I use the list as a reference, but when you're looking for different types of the quality of education, there are other things that people probably they need to know about. I mean, for example, what would you consider the most exclusive college in the country?

Exclusive yes.

Hardest to get into highest criteria.

Probably something like this one in Virginia. Yeah, so it's got two names. Two people names William and Mary.

William and Mary. Well, William and Mary is a good school. It's not an exclusive school.

Okay.

The one I'd share with a lot of people is Web Institute, w-e-b-p Web Institute. It's arguably the most exclusive college in the country because they only take 28 students a year 28. And if you get in it's free. I have two students there right now but if you get in it's free and you double major Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, that's it. But in that industry, in the maritime industry which, by the way, as industries go, people who go into the maritime industry that is the highest paid exit industry for college is the maritime industry, not computers or cybersecurity or whatever. It's the maritime industry. Most of them are going in at six figures right out of college and so. But people who go to Web, it's like going to West Point and being in the Army. I mean, you're at the top institution for the feeder of people in that industry and so you know. And so one of the things that we do is we're able to bring what I call my list of secret, hidden colleges and saying these are opportunities that most people don't even know exist and we have to look at funding opportunities and most people don't even know that they exist. I mean I was working with a student this week looking at one of the federal scholarships. They have a federal scholarship from the Department of Defense they're working in intelligence and one from the CIA. And those scholarships, if you get them, you become an employee, you're paid a salary and your job is to go to school and they pay for your school. When you're done you have a job with them when you graduate. I mean that's an incredible scholarship.

You know it brings sorry. It brings me to wonder, though, because you mentioned web it's free and it's a good education, right Paying six figure. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Please hold your thought. I also want you to address why someone would go to and I'm not disparaging NYU, but to NYU as opposed to another college. You know, nyu charges something like 30,000 a year or something maybe more a year. Why a $30,000 a year college as opposed to a $5,000 a year college?

Well, NYU is probably closer to 80,000.

Yeah.

Well, when people start talking NYU, I usually push them towards Fordham, st John's, hofstra, because those colleges give scholarships. All right, nyu doesn't have to give scholarships because they have enough demand. When you have enough demand and people perceive you to have some sort of a qualitative factor, that's going to translate to, you know, some opportunity, something in the future. You know, again, people are going based on their perception that it's going to be worth it and it's going to amortize itself and you're going to get a good ROI on that and that assumption is false. Okay, there's more evidence that the earth is flat than that assumption being true.

So it's just perceived value of that.

It's perceived value, and there's a lot of country club thinking, a lot of esteem and ego attached to it. Nyu is a good school. Is it worth the money? If I won the lottery I still wouldn't send somebody there. Okay, just because I don't think there's money is better spent. You know the city university is one of the best educations in the country. Okay, you know, the John Jay Law School is one of the best in the country. Okay. So yeah but if you're going to chart your course, for example, if you're wanting to become a Supreme Court Justice, you're going to have to go to the Supreme Court of Justice. John Jay is probably not the place you want to go. You'll want to go to Harvard or Yale and one of the ones that produce Supreme Court Justices. But if you just want to be your regular lawyer I mean I'm trying to thank your Johnny Cochran who defended OJ Simpson. I think he went to Loyola Merrimount in California. I mean it's not that it's a bad law school, but it's not in the high profile law school and a lot of your best lawyers didn't go to high profile law schools. Supreme Court Justices may have, but again, it's charting your course and understanding what is of value and what is not, and a lot of people believe there are certain things that are of value that in the long term are of no value. And they're willing to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to go to something that they perceive to be of high value. And if they take out loans, the loans they take out will never amortize themselves. They'll never get to a point and say I got more money or I was more successful because I went to this school, and that's. There's not one study that covers it. There's one study that that I refer to a lot. It's called the Kruger study. It was started in 1972. They took the people who got admitted, who got admitted to Harvard, and they tracked those who went to Harvard and those who were admitted but did not go. And it was a 40 year longitudinal study and after 40 years there was no significant difference in success, no significant difference in income or anything like that. So there are other people that produce some little snippets of things to say that going to an elite college has an advantage. Nobody can track it for 40 years like that. And there is, but it's a perception and colleges like to keep that perception if it's able to drive students to their campus and people willing to pay full freight.

Mm-hmm fooling its money.

Well, I give an illustration. For example, depending on where you live, you're going to probably have a community college nearby, a state college nearby and an expensive private college nearby. And the illustration I make is where I used to live. There's a community college and if you needed to take US history, it was going to cost you about $200 for that course. If you were going to go to the state college, it was going to cost you about $2,000. And if you were going to go to the private college, it was going to cost you about $6,000 to take the same course. Now, the last time I looked, columbus still left in 1492. And George Washington was still the first president. I kind of found out what changed. You know, the parking change. It cost you more to park at the expensive private school. So you know, a lot of people have, you know, differing perspectives on the value of an education. It's always good it's a bachelor's degree, maybe a master's degree, but when you start putting in the institution and stuff with it and thinking that somehow, by spending more to go to college is going to give you advantage in the long run, I'm not going to say no. I'm going to say can you show me the data? Show me the data I mean it's like this test optional that we're dealing with right now. People say, well, I'm not going to take the test, it doesn't count, I don't need it. So the data says that if you have a test score that's in the middle band or higher, your chances of being admitted are 50% greater than someone who doesn't submit test scores. So if you have half again a better chance, wouldn't it be wise to get good test scores? But, then they listen, they look at the label and say, oh, test optional. Well, that's a boon for many colleges because you've got a lot of people say, well, they're test optional, I don't have to turn it in my test, I'm going to apply on a wing and a prayer. So a lot of these colleges now have a significantly smaller percentage of people being admitted because double the people normally who are sending applications are sending an application. So just by the numbers, the percentage is going to go down. Plus, it's an income source for these colleges now because all these people who are applying on a wing and a prayer, they're paying the application fee. So some of the admissions departments are increasing their revenue in the millions of dollars. Yeah, and so someone asked me well, are they going to stop doing test optionals? I said no, because test optional makes money for them.

Yeah, okay, all right. You said that college debt exceeds all credit card debt, all automobile loans and more than the total national debt of Canada.

Yes.

So, but how can you achieve a college education, the one you desire, without a huge student debt?

Well, you go to schools that either cost less, but we'll go with our program. Okay, college funding there are five types of college funding that we work with and we use the acronym MONEY, m-o-n-e-y to remember this. I use a lot of acronyms because I have to remember things. Okay, so M, that's merit money. Okay, money you don't have to pay back has nothing to do with your income. Academic scholarships, athletic scholarships, artistic scholarships, activity scholarships you know, like cheerleading scholarships. Artistic scholarships I had one young lady just finished UCLA. She had a full scholarship in theater costuming. Wow, and so you know, and of course, athletic scholarships, academic scholarships you know, for example, the University of Alabama. If you have a 3.5 and a 32 ACT score, you automatically are given a $112,000 scholarship. That's automatic. There are many colleges that provide automatic scholarships. Okay, but those are merit, have nothing to do with income. So I do a lot of focus on merit scholarship. Next is opportunity. That means you have to do something to get this work. Study is an opportunity. Rotc by the way, the military provides more than half of the funding for colleges. It's the largest single provider of educational ROTC. I mean, I went to college at Texas Christian University on an army ROTC scholarship. They basically paid for everything. I had to give them some time in the army, but they basically paid for Getting becoming a resident advisor. You know there's different ways of finding opportunities to get funding Okay and their end is need-based. Now, need-based doesn't mean needy. It means the difference between what the FAFSA says you should have be able to afford and what the total cost of college. Now, one time I had a spouse and and to two daughters in college at the same time, my. This was about 12, 15 years ago and my annual cost for college was seventy two thousand dollars. But based on the FAFSA, they said I should be able to afford 36 of that, but the remaining 36 was need-based. So because it was need-based, I got qualified or my family qualified for all this need-based funding now, just thanks, the need-based funding pretty much filled up the other 36. We didn't take out loans I got. We did take out the 1% loan because it was it exceeded what we were getting me, our ROI. But I assure you, on on the other part, I didn't spend the thirty six thousand dollars out of pocket. I mean because there were other ways of us to get funding, you know. So there's it. So there are, there are just ways of doing this. But you don't have to be needy. You just have to be in a situation where there's a gap between what you're supposed to pay and what it costs, and there are ways of being able to understand how to, how to maximize what you get out of that now. And then you have e entitlement money. Now everybody, every every US citizen, legal resident Hat, is entitled to some form of federal aid. And most people say, well, we don't make enough money to get any federal aid, we're not gonna file everybody needs a file to FAFSA. There is some type of federal aid that you're gonna be able to get. Most entitlement has to do with in-state tuition. You're entitled in-state tuition in district or community colleges If you're in the military GI bill. There's other types of entitlements. You get this, you know. For example, entitlements for people who have you know, for hearing impaired, vision impaired, some. Some states will have entitlements for Buster kids, so there's different ways of getting these entitlements. I fact I worked with my One of my doctors my my allergy doctor Whose son was legally deaf and he was able to go to state colleges for free. And she's a doctor, okay, and then why is your own money? Every college will accept your cash, check of money, or, but you want to minimize your out-of-pocket expenses. Yeah now, if there are some people who say, okay, I'm just gonna go and pay for it, I'm gonna take it out and hide. Well, there's ways you can pay for college without having to have stitches, okay, there there are. There are pathways that we've had people come to us and we gave them a pathway Would be minimum out-of-pocket and to the point that they would. You know, you're talking 12, maybe 15,000 a year, which is which is reasonable Out-of-pocket. Many thing more than that is probably not reasonable. But it's about it's reasonable out-of-pocket, so you're not gonna have to go on food stamps or anything like that, because you're paying that much, but there's other ways of paying for it. So, but again most people don't know. Most people don't know. Even the people who are in this so-called industry. They don't know because they're they're they're going with the standard gig of you know, we're gonna help you apply for your loans, we're gonna help you apply for your college, and most of them don't get into the intricacies. I mean what. They're more like ambulance drivers. They can take you to where you need to go, but they're not gonna be able to perform major surgery on you. So you know so, and I'm not trying to cut these people down, but you haven't realized it when you're. You know when you're dealing with somebody. Well, here here's a question If you want to find out if somebody really knows what they're doing, ask them what percentage of the parents assets are counted towards the student in the FAFSA. That's a simple question. You have to contact me for the answer. But if you don't know that, that's like a doctor not knowing the bones in the forearm.

You know yeah.

If you're a professional, you know that Okay.

Yeah.

If you don't know that, then you're just what we call a loan arranger. You know, you're just there to get them set up for loans, which they can pretty much do by themselves.

Yeah, all right, thank you. I really appreciate you coming and talking to us today. You've given us a lot to chew on, I'm sure. How can we get in touch with you?

Well, you can contact me directly at my website, beastlycollegeprepcom B-E-A-S-L-E-Y beastlycollegeprepcom, depending on the number of people I'll be willing to, of your members and your people, we'll be willing to give them a free initial console, just kind of get them pointed in the right direction and kind of start some of the deprogramming. If I get too many of them, I'll set it up as a webinar because we've had people we've had like 150 people to send on us in 48 hours. Of course we're not going to be able to have an individual. So if there's a lot of people, then we'll set up a webinar specifically for them. But you know we're here to help. I mean, people are paying way too much for college and they don't need to.

Right, okay, all right. So before we let you go, could you give us one piece of advice for a parent after a high school student who wants to go to college?

Okay, start early, start early, okay, that's number one Good grades. There's never a substitute for good grades. Getting a realm of recognition, getting involved, volunteers, things like that, getting in experiences, working, getting a job again, volunteering activities, get involved with activities and in leadership. And finally, your test scores. I don't care what they say about test optional, unless you're going to a California state schools which will not accept your test scores. Everybody else, although they say test optional, everybody else is going to. If you have a good test score, it's going to be a factor Okay. And they say they won't count against you. If you don't have a test score, you're not going to be lowered, but if you have a good test score you may be brought up.

Okay, make sense. Anything else?

Well, we I go back to test scores we spend a significant amount of our time working with our clients getting the test scores up, because that is the only variable that we can really move the needle on once they're a sophomore or junior is by bringing the test score up. And again, our colleges that, based on GPA and test scores alone, will admit you in scholarship.

Right, okay, thank you very much, cunabee, for coming and talking to us in Solomon's talk. I appreciate you. Yeah, thank you, thank you.