11 Is a College Degree Necessary?

In this provocative episode of Winning Regardless, Coach Rodo tackles a controversial topic: the necessity of a college degree for a successful life. He opens by challenging the traditional "no degrees, no cheese" mentality, arguing that society has set young people up for failure by pushing them all towards a four-year university education.

This episode is a candid look at the importance of trades and skilled labor, asking why we don't encourage kids to become plumbers or welders. Coach Rodo shares a deeply personal story about his own son who flunked out of college but found incredible success on his own terms with an associate's degree and a passion for sales. He argues that the real measure of success is not a framed piece of paper, but rather a person's ability to "fix a problem." This episode is a powerful message for parents, educators, and young people who feel pressured to follow a path that may not be right for them.

Key Discussion Points:

Degree vs. Success: A challenge to the "no degrees, no cheese" mindset and a discussion on why most people don't use their college degree in their professional life.

The Value of Trade Schools: Why hands-on skills like welding, plumbing, and electrical work are crucial, lucrative, and often overlooked paths to a successful career.

A Parent's Realization: Coach Rodo's personal story of his son flunking out of college and the subsequent realization that he needed to let his son forge his own path.

The Power of an Associate's Degree: The incredible success story of Coach Rodo’s son, who built a thriving career in sales and paid for his house with just an associate’s degree.

"Fixing a Problem": A new way to define engineering and ingenuity by looking at how people use their hands to solve real-world problems.

Knowing Your Kids: A message to parents about the importance of knowing their children's aptitudes and not forcing them down a path dictated by societal pressure.

Transcript

Welcome to another edition of Coach Rodo's Winning Regardless podcast. This episode is gonna be on having your degree, whether it's necessary to success in life or not. That's kind of a tricky question because when you think about your degree, you go to school to get a degree and hopefully you work in that field. the reality of it is,

Most of us that get a degree, we don't work in that field. ⁓ Because as I was just brought to my attention, because perhaps you decide to get out of college and you go to try to work in that field, but you don't get the opportunity to.

learn that field the way that you were taught it in college. And so therefore, it draws you away from it. And it sends you to wanting to do something, wanting to go work somewhere else. So you end up going to do work at another job, doing something that you had no idea about doing. You didn't get a degree in, so you feel like you may have wasted your degree. ⁓

you feel like you're not gonna make the money that you need to make when, because my era that I came up in, ⁓ you couldn't get a good job with our degree. mean, hell, you couldn't even work in a good factory unless you had a degree. And what was the importance of the degree, not only when you look at it, other than giving these institutions money

them telling you that this is the only way that you can make money in life and how many really do make more money in life because of a degree. I know what the statistics show, but most of the people that I know that are doing well,

And they're regular everyday Joe guys like myself. You know, I have a degree, but shit, I didn't get my degree till I was 40, but I was still making good money. You know, I got buddies who don't have degrees right now and they're making good money. I mean, and then you look at the innovation of today's youth, you know, how innovative they are. You you look at your social media platforms, they're making so much.

content, they're building so much content, they're making so much money off of content, off of being themselves, being a person, being a personality. ⁓ That doesn't take a degree, you know? We have to get away from telling our kids in order to be anything worthwhile, you need a degree. I mean, what's wrong with going to a trade school? You know, what's wrong with becoming an electrician? Hell, I have a hard time finding a goddamn plumber.

You know what I mean? And you can go to school for three, four months because that's what I try to do. I try to tell young kids who I know school ain't for them, but I know that the streets is a fingertip away. I try to tell them, man, look, man, man, I don't give a damn about no promise. Coach Marshall, I don't want to go to no college, but man, I just been to school for 12 years. Okay, can you do six more months?

You do six more months, you can become a welder, you can become an electrician, you can become a plumber, you can become a mechanic, you can become something that will pay you for the rest of your life to where you don't have to worry about that fingertip in the streets touching you. That's where we need to start telling our kids, telling them that they're not gonna be anything without a degree. kind of...

keeps them torn because now all of a sudden you're pretty much setting them up for failure because again, what if that kid don't want to go to school for four years, but he has a skill, he just don't know it yet. But you've already told him that he's not gonna be nothing for not going to college. So guess what? I ain't gonna go to college, so I'm not gonna be sh*t. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And we kind of add to that by telling our kids that...

College is very very important. I fell into that trap. I used to tell my son that you know They'll tell you I was on along the Shaq you know, no degrees no cheese But I had to change it because I had to realize that like my oldest son You can't get that motherf*#ker to sit in no school. No class that motherf*#ker flunked out first fucking semester But I knew why because for the first time in his life, he had tasted freedom

And I remember when I was a kid, my grandmama used to tell us all the time, freedom is better than breathing. And once he got that freedom, he didn't care about nothing else. So right there told me that at this age, he's like me.

He can't sit in no motherfucking classroom all day and then go out and party and kick it and get up the next morning and then go to class again. No, he got to recover because he kicked it hard that night. Well, why you recovering your grades and all of that is going to... And, you know, again, like I said, it caught up to him. He flunked out, which wasn't a big deal. And I had, you know, felt so bad about it. But why? Because I didn't need to.

It was because I felt that he failed and I failed as a parent, which is bullshit. You know what I mean? Like, how can I put him flunking out of school as my failure or as his failure when the motherf*#ker's only 19 years old? You know what mean? Like, what label of failure because you flunked out of school?

makes you a failure in life at 19 years old. No, motherf*#ker, we gotta find your next niche. And that's what he did. Motherfucker found a niche in selling shoes and he became real good at it. But one thing that he understood, but he wanted to come work for us, but I told him you had to have a degree to where I had to reevaluate what my thought process was to change it to an associate. Cause I knew he could do that.

I knew he'd go to school and get his associate's because that's not going to, you know, and that's not diminishing an associate's degree because you, you know, if you listen to my podcast, maybe five, you probably don't have five or six friends with an associate's degree that's in your close circle. One of my cousins had to explain that to me when I didn't think an associate's degree was worth a damn. When he sat there and he said to me, motherf*#ker, we around six of us and only two of us got a degree, me and you. And I had to think about that.

And I'm sitting around guys who I thought were pretty smart guys, but they just worked and didn't go to school, wasn't them. So he made me see the importance of that associate because it showed a commitment. And once I told my older son, OK, get your associate issue more than he knocked that shit out. He knocked that shit out quick. Because again, it wasn't a me.

pressing and telling him, you're not gonna be shit without your degree, because that's a lie. Everybody's not gonna be a professional athlete where you can skip school early, you know, you'll leave school early, go there just to go play football, go there to play basketball, whatever you go there to get. The numbers of that support itself, so get that out your head. But what you can do to be successful, I have a friend of mine at home in Lansing named Eric Crenshaw.

Right now what he does, I called him about five years ago, he's like, man, he's a welder. I said, man, you need to grab you a couple little kids, little black kids, take them with you to the job, talk to the job. Hey, I want to show them what it's like to be a welder instead of a third. Talked to him about six months ago, shit, two of the kids that he took became welders. You know, it was because they saw something in that that they liked.

I can go to school to do that, because this is some hands-on shit. I get to use my hands. I can do this for six months. And then when I get out, you mean to tell me that I can go get a job making this amount of money? Because you you think about it, they're not coming out. Unless you tell them what their money dream is, they don't have a money dream. They have a dream to provide for themselves, to get for themselves, to be able to get a car, to be able to get a crib, you know?

not a house, a crib. A crib is an apartment or a house. They just want to be able to do that. And when we tell them that in order to attain those things is through a degree, we're setting a bad, bad precedence because most people don't think of an associate as a degree. They don't think as an apprenticeship as a degree. mean, electrician apprenticeship, that's a fucking degree. A plumbers, ⁓ a plumbers apprenticeship, that's a degree.

Welding a pretty ship. That's a degree the skilled trades Aptitude test is just as tough as getting a goddamn bachelors degree the only difference is his hands on which most kids are

You have the ones that are very, very book drawn. Those are the ones that's gonna be, you're going to college. But the ones that you can't reach, the ones that you don't think have the aptitude, I bet you them is the best ones with their hands at doodling, at putting something together, at engineering. Because it's not called engineering to them, it's called fixing a problem to them. Engineering is a word. It's an educational word.

But in regular every day is called fixing a fucking problem.

You know, we don't think of it as, I'm about to engineer this so that I can open up the refrigerator. No, I'm about to engineer this so I can put it in the TV and put the foil on the top so that the TV get reception. No, motherf*#ker, you ain't thinking engineer. You thinking I'm fixing the problem. I think this hammer, I mean, I think this hanger, if I put it back here, make the antenna a little longer, put some foil on there to get it, then no, okay, okay, look at the station, it's a little bit better. You know, and then we, that, you,

engineered some shit, to us, we fixed the problem. So we have to look at the way that we word things to the kids today, to the youngsters today, you know, and not guide them so much towards their own demise, so to speak. And when I say that, I mean, you know if your goddamn kid...

And I say G-O-T, not G-O-D, got. You know if your goddamn kid is smart enough to do four years in school, but you also know if your kid can handle doing six months using his hands, learning something. We all, I always say, one thing that I took pride in as a fucking parent was I knew my kids. If you come to me and you told me that either one of my sons, that they teacher, he told me, fuck you, he cussed me out just down the third, no, no, no.

No, no see we grew up in an era where your parents believed everything that a motherfucking teacher told them Whether it was true or not and we all know teachers lied on us like a mug, you know, especially if you throw in the hood

You couldn't tell me that about my kid, but if you told me my son was talking to his buddy next to him during the test, or, you know, I'm up on the board and he back there cracking jokes and this, that, that, they're all, hell yeah. Cause that's my boys. You know, I took pride in knowing my sons because I never wanted a teacher to be able to lie to me about them and have them feel a certain way about me because I didn't even let them tell me their side.

So I always did that. So in saying that, we have to not push our kids to what we believe society says is best for them. We have to push our kids for what we know is best for them.

I look at my son, my oldest son now, this motherf*#ker is crib, a house, not a crib, a house paid for. Got him a sweet car, got him a motorcycle. mean, you know, bought him a trailer. mean, go travels the country and just, you know, just does all kinds of things on a fucking socialist degree.

Not a master's, not a master's, some shit that we told him that he needed to have in order to have the life that he has right now. We can't set the bar for them. They have to set their own bar. What we have to do is give them a bar to look at so they can choose where they want to set that motherf*#ker. I would like to thank you for taking the time to listen to me talk about...

degrees, the importance of them, the importance of trade school, the importance of knowing our kids and not setting them up to failure by having them do something that we believe that society wants us to tell them they need to be successful.

Again, I would like to thank you for listening to Coach Rodo's Winning Regardless. You can find us on anywhere, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. You have a great day.