Gen Z is questioning college. Hucksters are taking advantage of them.

Kimberly Elliott for BIA few years ago, Nehemiah Jordan was a sophomore at Liberty University studying film and writing, with dreams of becoming a Hollywood director, when he was rejected for an internship. The setback helped him realize how long a path he faced before he could land a role in the movie industry with creative license. So he started poking around for something that might give him more immediate control of his time and money. He found an online sales course called Closer Cartel, which touts itself as a cheaper, easier, and lucrative alternative to college."Instead of having to listen to broke professors teach you about an average life," Closer Cartel's website says, "you get to learn a skill from someone who is actually doing what you want to do in life."In a promotional video, Luke Alexander, Closer Cartel's Mercedes-driving, yacht-sailing 25-year-old founder — and a proud college dropout — breathlessly lays out the stakes. "The safe path of going to school, getting a degree, and then working a job until you retire is no longer the safe path. It's one of the worst paths you can have if you want time, vocation, and honestly, live freedom." Instead of falling for the "scam" of higher ed, Alexander says, for only $1,000 (which seems to be perennially on sale from $2,997), he'll teach you the sales skills that have helped "20-year-olds all over the world earn more than a doctor's salary."Jordan gave it a go. Within a few weeks, he finished the self-guided course on remote sales. Then, Jordan says, Alexander told him he could learn more about sales if he took a course run by his friend Iman Gadzhi, a 25-year-old Russian-born British YouTuber with 5.5 million subscribers.Gadzhi runs a small empire of online-course platforms that claim to teach people how to start various online businesses. Among them is Educate, which aims to "revolutionize the education system" by offering "world-class learning" modules on sales and dropshipping. Course titles include "Six-Figure Sales Rep," "Pathway to Profits," and "The Art of the Deal." Other modules marketed to young men, some taught by Gadzhi himself, include "Boxing Fundamentals," a holistic health detoxing course, and a self-styling guide that helps students "achieve confidence in your fashion choices." Educate's website claims that more than 30,000 students have been "transformed through our programs."Gadzhi, who brags about being a "high school dropout," also proclaims in many videos and promotional materials that college is a propaganda-filled, sheep-producing money pit. "Ninety-nine percent of the people who go to college are fucking dumbwits," he says in one YouTube video. In another, titled "Iman Gadzhi CONVINCES Kid To NOT Attend College," he tells a high school senior that he risks "wasting four years on outdated knowledge and, quite frankly, getting ripped off." In another, he calls the college-degree system "modern slavery."Jordan says he parlayed his connection to Gadzhi into a gig working as a sales coach at Educate, recruiting young men like him to take courses like the ones he'd just taken. Gadzhi and Alexander did not respond to multiple interview requests and requests for comment.Americans' faith in college is in rapid decline. A 2024 Gallup poll found that only 36% of respondents had a "great deal" of confidence in the higher education system, down from 57% in 2015 (22% had "very little" confidence, up from 9%). A Pew Research study last year found that only 47% of US adults believe that college is worth it if a student doesn't have to take out loans; if the student does have to take out loans, that number drops to 22%. (The average loan debt for US college students in 2024 was $38,000.) The study also found that only 25% of adults believe college is essential to getting a high-paying job.Young adults, meanwhile, see a high-paying job as increasingly essential. A 2024 survey from the financial services firm Empower found that the average Gen Z respondent believed that an annual salary of $587,797 — some 10 times the median income in America — and a net worth of $9.47 million are necessary to achieve "financial success." (Baby boomers in the same survey put the success threshold at $99,000 a year.)Professors across the country have also noticed that students are changing. They've reported an uptick in undergraduates daunted at the prospect of reading a book, increasingly reliant on ChatGPT, and who view the college experience as a transactional means to get a job. "Younger people are also becoming much more aware of the necessity of big economic changes that allow them to have a better shot at economic security when they're out of college," says Jon Shelton, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and the author of "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy." "They're recognizing that even if they major in the right thing and get a job, they still might be working at Starbucks."Now, a new type of "professor" is offering a faster path to prosperity. Capitalizing on Gen Z's rising doubts about higher education, social media-fueled attraction to easy riches, and a crisis in masculinity, a cottage industry of online business course gurus has arisen. Beyond Alexander and Gadzhi, the ranks include Jordan Welch, a dropshipping entrepreneur with 1.8 million YouTube subscribers; and Dan Lok, a self-described "King of High Ticket Sales" with 5 million YouTube subscribers. Dozens of men in their 20s and 30s are selling, predominantly to men in their late teens and early 20s, unregulated courses on building online businesses, and marketing them as "alternatives" and supplements to college that yield many more returns with much less wokeness.In slickly produced videos, these gurus relentlessly lambast how the Ivory Tower "brainwashes" people into taking "mediocre jobs," while splicing in images of the lavish lifestyles that dropping out (as most of them ecstatically have) and building online business empires have afforded them — Ferraris in Dubai, G Wagons in Miami, caviar bumps on private planes. The message is clear: Buy my course and you too can "escape the matrix" and win.A few months ago, I received a marketing email for an Educate program called Digital Launchpad. It presented two choices. One, pay many tens of thousands of dollars toward a "traditional degree, only to find yourself among countless others with similar qualifications." Or pay just $37 a month and "gain instant access to cutting-edge online strategies that are working right now." For the purposes of this story, I took the red pill.Digital Launchpad "equips you for success," its website reads, by teaching you the fundamentals of making money through online ventures and helping you make your first $1,000 online. (Another Gadzhi program, Agency Accelerator, costs $1,500.)Upon opening Digital Launchpad, I'm greeted with an introduction video by Gadzhi, called "How to Unf*ck Your Life." "Welcome to the beginning of the rest of your life. And most importantly, welcome to freedom," he says. He speaks in a confident, flat tone while gazing into the camera — the same approach deployed by the dozens of young, male online-course gurus I received ads for while reporting this story.Watching Gadzhi's tutorials at times feels like reading a paragraph-long summary of a book. Details on effective business strategy are often thin and rote. At one point, Gadzhi makes a point about the importance of packaging by saying that consumers choose their ice cream based on the best-looking cartons, before moving on.Like many other programs in its orbit, Digital Launchpad isn't simply a guide to making money, it sells a lifestyle fashioned in the likeness of its founder. In another video, Gadzhi walks me through "Monk Mode," his name for a distraction-free, laser-focused mindset that maximizes productivity and helps you "surpass the competition." Monk Mode entails daily exercise, meditation, abstaining from alcohol and weed, limiting social media time, and unfollowing everyone on Instagram that you haven't spoken to in the past year. After extolling the virtues of meditation, Gadzhi smirks at the camera and says, "I don't know if I should tell you this," pauses for a second, and confesses he doesn't meditate anymore. Instead, he engages in a more advanced practice he calls "bioenergetics." He offers no further explanation.Iman Gadzhi in a recent YouTube video, "Brutally Honest Truth On How To Get Rich (In 17 Minutes)."YouTubeGadzhi's evangelist tendencies have not gone unnoticed. Matthew Remski, an author and the host of the podcast "Conspirituality," says he learned about Gadzhi when his preteen son was served an ad for one of Gadzhi's online seminars called The Rescue, which promises to "reveal to you all the traits that the current Education system has been keeping away from you during your entire life and how to use them to succeed outside of the system." Remski reported the ad to his son's school, which blocked the ad from students' Chromebooks. Gadzhi, he tells me, is very adroit at identifying "very specific economic and status grievances related to his clients' state of alienation or commiseration within capitalism, he's able to speak to those young people as though he's their confidant, as though he's taking them seriously for the first time."Remski and his cohosts have dedicated two hour-long episodes to dissecting how "Gadzhi is reaching more aggressively into the brains of pre-teen boys around the world with a morbid fantasy about the origins of public education." There are also dozens of Reddit threads and YouTube videos criticizing Gadzhi's marketing tactics and questioning the value of his courses; including a series of lengthy videos from Spencer Cornelia (550,000 followers) alleging Gadzhi makes his students "empty promises.""People are always looking for the golden ring, the easy money appeal," Steven Hassan, a cult expert and author "The Cult of Trump," tells me of online course gurus broadly. "They show images and videos of Rolls Royces and mansions and beautiful women and say, you know, it's simple, it's easy, it's fast, be like me. If the person is very convincing with certainty, ask them to see the last three years of their tax returns, which they will never share. Then you know that it's a fraud or you know that the Rolex is a fake knockoff."Digital Launchpad includes access to the Digital Accelerator Discord server, where Gadzhi's community of pupils convenes. Upon entering, I'm immediately ranked within a feudal hierarchy. Participants in the course are given titles and little badges that show up next to their names. Since I'm new, I'm an Apprentice, and there's a bronze hexagon next to my name. Once I reach month two, I'll level up to Craftsman. I'll be upgraded to Diplomat after three months, Lord after four (when your hexagon gets little wings attached to it), Prince at six, and King after a full year. The only requisite to leveling up appears to be continuing to pay for the monthly Digital Launchpad subscription. There aren't any tests to pass, essays to write, or assignments to turn in. Students can jump directly to the King level if they buy the yearly subscription instead of the monthly one.Krenar, a 21-year-old fellow Apprentice, says that Digital Launchpad "offers me this great community of like-minded individuals." A current computer science major, he believes the lessons taught on Digital Launchpad are "way more relevant than anything a marketing degree could teach you." (He requested I not name the university he's enrolled in or his last name to not jeopardize future job prospects.) Just a few weeks into his Digital Launchpad path, he's confident he'll eventually be able to start his own marketing agency.Jamal, a Grand Vizier (a rank above King), briefly attended a community college in Washington state before dropping out. He felt he didn't fit in at the school, and the courses weren't preparing him to land a job. He turned to Digital Launchpad to "learn the skills needed for me to be able to thrive in the sales market online," and to network with "like-minded individuals," a phrase I encounter repeatedly in the Discord channel. Other common expressions include "achieving financial freedom," "becoming a sovereign man," and "escaping the rat race." In the student introduction channel, one person says, "I've been wanting to escape the matrix for a while now."In another channel, pupils seek advice on how to advertise their dropshipping venture. One dropshipping disciple says he's down to the last $15 in his bank account and wants advice on which social media platform he should use to spend his last dollars to advertise his store. Others need assistance identifying scam emails from people posing as Shopify representatives. Another claims he'll forward a job opportunity in Dubai — but only if he receives a follow-back on Instagram. Some messages are more hopeful, with some students posting screenshots of money they say they've earned as a result of following Educate's teachings.Bryce, a 20-year-old from Utah, has been enrolled in Educate for nearly a year. He hasn't attended college and doesn't feel the need to achieve his goals, he says. "All that I need to do to get into the business world is put myself out there and market myself. So it gave me all the things I needed," he says. When I check in with him a few months later, in late April, he tells me, "I haven't made any real money from it yet."Nehemiah Jordan ultimately decided to finish his degree. He doesn't believe online programs like Educate can fully replace college, at least "outside of the classroom," Jordan tells me. "Just being around people that are your age at the same stage of life, there's a lot of growth that happens on a college campus, I believe that is difficult to replicate digitally." Still, he's frustrated with the lack of clarity on what college has prepared him for. "What are we actually learning? What are the actual skills that we are building? That gets very lost."The purpose of higher education extends beyond improving one's financial prospects. But values like becoming an informed citizen, developing critical-thinking skills, and learning for the sake of learning can get lost amid a shaky, pressure-cooker economy and ever-rising tuition costs. "Colleges could really be doing a lot better than they currently are to educate people for careers and for the workplace," David Deming, a professor of political economy at Harvard University, says. "There's a lot of teaching of things that are very abstract and not that related to the things you need to know."Deming stresses that "it still turns out that for most people getting a degree versus not getting a degree is worth the investment." In 2023, the median annual salary for bachelor's degree holders was $60,000, compared to a high school graduate's median salary of $36,000. By a mid-career age of 45 to 50, college graduates make 60% to 70% more than peers who didn't attend college."We effectively make a promise to students when they come in: You get a degree and you'll be better off," says Neil Kraus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin River Falls. "We effectively promised them that as a society."But "what you're seeing is young people are saying, well, I have to borrow all this money up front today to undertake this risky investment, it's not going to pay off for 20 years," Deming says.Online-course gurus are far from the only ones sowing the seeds of doubt about higher education in America. In April, Palantir announced it was starting a Meritocracy Fellowship for "the best and brightest graduating high school students," encouraging them to "skip the debt, skip the indoctrination" of college. In an interview with Theo Von published earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg said, "I'm not sure that college is preparing people for, like, the jobs that they need to have today." The Harvard dropout added, "I think there's going to have to be a reckoning with and people are going to have to kind of figure whether that makes sense."Watching these entrepreneurs' flashy videos, I feel a tinge of envy. Most of these men are around my age, some younger, and they say they're worth millions. Should I have traded in my liberal arts education for a dropshipping empire?In a recent video, called "Brutal Honest Truth On How To Get Rich (In 17 Minutes)," Gadzhi trains in the boxing ring, takes a cold plunge, and drives around a Middle Eastern city in a sports car with a friend who sports an identical haircut and identical sunglasses. At the end of the video, sitting shirtless in a red-light sauna, Gadzhi explains the plight of the investment banker, whose best hope is to retire to the beach after toiling for decades of no "time freedom." Meanwhile, the man who starts an online business now "can live that lifestyle right now. He can run his business from a paradise city and live that same chill lifestyle by the beach," Gadzhi says. "While he's still young, and that's so important." The choice is yours, young man. Chain yourself to the system for 50 years, or click the link below the video and enroll in Gadzi's Make Money Online LIVE Challenge: "Let's build your first Digital Product, LIVE, together, over the course of 5 days."Miles MacClure is a freelance journalist based in Chicago.Read the original article on Business Insider

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Gen Z is questioning college. Hucksters are taking advantage of them.

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