‘Manfluencers’ Insist That College Is a Scam. Here's What They're Not Telling You
- Oil Is Crashing. Why Are Gas Prices Still So High?
- The Memory Chip Crisis Could Make Your Next iPhone, PS5 or Laptop Cost Hundreds More
- Health Insurance Premiums Could Spike 20% in These States Next Year
- Social Security COLA Predictions Rise as Inflation Hits a 3-Year High
- Cristiano Ronaldo vs. Lionel Messi: Who's the Richest 2026 World Cup Player?
College is a scam. AI can teach you anything. You can make good money on your own.
Scroll long enough through the corners of social media that target young men, and you'll find a recurring message that college is not worth it.
The pitch is simple and increasingly common: Pursue entrepreneurship or a trade instead, because college will leave you broke and four years behind. But higher education researchers and counselors say it's a dangerously incomplete message.
Their concern is not that every young man should attend college. It is that this viral anti-college content often overshadows more nuanced advice about whether to go to college, what to study, how much to borrow and what alternatives actually pay.
Must Read
The anti-college echo chamber on social media
The social media critiques of college education vary. Some focus on the costly debt, while others claim the curriculum fails to teach practical skills or attack the political climate.
Grant Cardone, an entrepreneur and influencer, says that major companies have dropped the college degree as a work requirement (factcheck: that doesn't actually mean they're hiring more people without degrees). The cost of tuition and lost income make him regret spending five years in college for an accounting degree. He argues that college effectively costs the average person around $400,000 — an amount that higher education researchers dispute — while failing to guarantee a good job on the other end.
"I would never, ever do that again, ever," he says in a YouTube clip. "When you're 17, 18 years old, you need income, and you need job experience. You get no job experience at college."
He goes on to call college the No. 1 most inflated commodity in the U.S.
"I don't know that Elon [Musk] cares that I went to college. I think he just wants to know that I can move a rocket to Mars, and he would hire me," Cardone says. "This is an old, old idea. Play by our rules: House rules. Go to college."
Anti-college videos that trend on social media often follow a similar script, describing a degree as a bad deal and pitching an alternative path, according to a research paper from College Access: Research & Action (CARA), a New York City-based nonprofit that studies higher education. It's a genre of content "clearly targeting young men," the paper said.
But while it's true that the go-to-college argument is conventional — you could even call it "old-fashioned" — that doesn't mean it's categorically wrong.
Reid Higginson, director of policy research at CARA, says it's common to see videos describing college as a scam.
"That's a message that's really easy to digest, something that's easy to go viral and something that lacks the nuance of the actual truth about college," he says.
Young men are reconsidering the value of college
The social media onslaught comes at a time when young men already seem disinterested in higher education. Women have long outnumbered men on campuses. But that gap has widened to a record level, with women now making up nearly 58% of the undergraduate population. When men do enroll, they’re less likely to earn a degree.
It’s hard to identify any single cause for the trend. Researchers point to several possible explanations, including early gender gaps in academic achievement, alternative job options in male-dominated fields and cultural ideas about masculinity.
Whether influencers are driving the idea that college isn’t the best place for young men or merely capitalizing on it is hard to say.
Clavicular, an influencer and college dropout who posts on livestreaming platform Kick, has promoted the idea that college is often a waste. "The college degree is completely [expletive] meaningless,” he said last week in Paris. Later adding, “Creative people can’t go to college, it ruins their thinking entirely.”
Dan Martell, an entrepreneurship coach with 2.7 million Instagram followers, said in a video posted June 14 that he wouldn’t encourage his sons to enroll. "In this world we live in of AI — where I can learn anything — I honestly believe over the next five years, we're going to wake up and these institutions are going to be gone."
If college is not the answer, what are young men supposed to do, according to these influencers? The answers range from building startups with AI to completing apprenticeships to manual work.
Halima Moore, a counselor at College Achieve Central Charter School in New Jersey, says the students she works with are seeing "quick money" alternatives to college on social media. These paths are often risky, and there's no comparison to the economic "security" a degree affords, she says.
College serves as proof of work ethic and achievement to employers, she says. And it's not nearly as expensive as influencers state. Federal and state aid can often cover tuition for the low-income families Moore works with, she says, which regularly surprises parents and students.
Where People Are Investing Right Now
Everyone agrees it's a challenging job market for Gen Z college grads. But Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), says the "manosphere" is misdiagnosing the problem.
"This whole male influencer [idea] that we've lost masculinity, and you're only going to find it by hammering a nail, it's narrow-sighted," Strohl says.
AI is not negating the value of a college degree in the eyes of employers, Strohl says, nor are young workers struggling primarily because their education failed to teach them relevant job skills.
Strohl points to a lack of turnover in the job market rather than any recent failure by colleges. He calls the labor market "frozen," citing challenges related to tariffs, interest rates, government labor cuts and a pullback in research funding.
"It's created a supply surplus of college-educated workers, and that feeds over to the entry-level worker," he says.
What the influencers aren't telling you
Some of the anti-college messaging has elements of truth: The price of a degree can be unaffordable for many Americans, and many graduates do struggle to manage their loan payments.
Yet even after factoring in the high cost to attend, the college wage premium — which has long been the basic argument behind efforts to increase postsecondary enrollment — remains.
Workers ages 25 to 54 with bachelor's degrees earn "70% more at the median than workers with only a high school diploma and face much lower unemployment rates," according to the Georgetown University CEW's research. A separate estimate from the Cleveland Fed forecasts that college-educated workers will still be out-earning workers with less education by roughly 76% in 2042.
Of course, those statistics are based on averages. What you study matters: Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and business majors have historically led to the highest return on investment, Douglas Webber, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board, found in a 2018 report. Arts and humanities tend to deliver a weaker ROI, especially if you pay more to earn the degree. Students in those fields who attend private colleges only have about 50-50 odds that their college investment will pay off, Webber’s model shows.
It's also about how you take advantage of the experience. Ed Devine, a regional admission officer at Hampden-Sydney College, an all-male college in Virginia, says it's normal for students to be unsure about what they want to do professionally. Introductory classes and students' first internships can provide clarity. The key is to keep the end goal in mind.
"Enter college with an eye on the career service center," Devine says.
Other students know exactly what they want to do at a young age, and good-paying careers do exist that don't require a two- or four-year degree. Jeremy Oskins, an automotive and robotics instructor at Comanche High School in Texas, says some of his auto shop students are landing jobs directly out of high school at Ford dealerships, for example.
"The industry's hurting so bad that they're wanting to pull them straight out of high school and put them to work," Oskins says.
But even advocates of the skilled trades say young people should weigh their options carefully. Mike Greenawalt, former CEO of Rosendin Electric, a large electrical contracting firm, says influencers have “grossly overstated” the pathways into the skilled trades.
"I'm thrilled that after almost five decades in the industry apprenticeships are now viewed as a viable alternative, but it's not the easy button,” he says. “They're painting the alternative like you're going to go make $500,000 a year in the first five years."
In reality, the completion rate for apprenticeship programs is lower than college completion rates. Skilled trades are a grind, not the get-rich-quick paradise some expect, Greenawalt says.
Ultimately, there’s no one right path for everyone. Depending on your interests and goals, earning a four-year college degree, launching a business right out of school or training for a skilled trade may all make sense — even if that message isn’t as viral as the ones you’re seeing online.