My view on education has always been... different.

My buddy Chris asked me a great question over coffee: “What would you tell a high school senior to do today?”

Here’s what I told him. Order them as you wish.

Travel. Undecided and a little adventurous? Take 12 months and backpack the world. Weird to some around here, I know. But it’s super common globally. You come back with an international network, grit, and stories for life.

College, if you have a scholarship or your parents are paying. Go for it. But the degree is only half of it. Join the clubs. Do the group stuff. Networking and experiences are just as important as the classroom. Those buddies become your future network.

Get into the trades. If college isn’t your thing, or it means taking on debt, look hard at the trades. You can earn real money right out of high school — even more if you’ll travel for work. And there are no student loans following you around. If money is important to you, you may even get further ahead going this route than college. Right now you can get paid to learn a trade, given the demand.

Set on being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, nurse, CPA? Then the four-year university is your trade school. No way around it.

And everybody should start something. Use all the new AI tools. Lean in hard. Build a local shop a new website. Fix something for a business and show them. It’s never been easier to learn any skill you want, and 100% of businesses will eventually adopt this technology. Why can’t you be the expert?

So I’ll flip it to you. What would you tell a high school senior to do today?

College education. The need for trade workers. Rising tuition. Almost $2 trillion of student loan debt. General thoughts on improving these — or actions to take?

Make student loans dismissible in bankruptcy. Right now they aren’t, short of proving “undue hardship,” which is a high bar almost nobody clears. Changing that forces lenders to think twice about a loan and what it’s for, knowing they may not collect. As tuition rises, loans are handed out right alongside it without accountability. It doesn’t matter what a student studies. The schools aren’t on the hook for helping students get employed either. That one rule change would naturally pull the rest of it toward something more sensible.

What if schools promoted a three-year degree? Do they legally have to be four? I genuinely don’t know. But could students test out, or declare a major and move straight to the serious classes instead of repeating high school, if they’re already clear on what they want? Seems like a good marketing move for a university and a real way to lower costs. Maybe someone’s already doing it.

And trades — wow. Make trades cool again. We’re way behind and we need more. Kids can make bank: train, earn, and be ahead of most of the people who went to college. Plenty of people are pushing on this from different angles, but it’s the one that interests me most.