Hi, I'm Alex Jackson Jolly. I'm here with Dr. Marcus Collins, who's a clinical assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan.

He is also the author of For the Culture, the power behind what we buy, what we do, and who we want to be. So welcome, Marcus.

Hi, how's it going? Yeah, glad to talk to you. We, this is the third in a series of conversations we've been having around

college as a investment, one of the larger investments that people will make in their lifetime,

and how they should be thinking about that return on their investment.

It's appropriate because right around now, if you have a student at home, a senior home, or if you're a parent or a professor,

you know that students are getting their applications in right now and getting ready for

those decisions to come back. So consumers of

higher education are really thinking about this right now. And so I wanted to ask

you, what do you think are the big things that these students should be thinking

about in terms of making sure they get the most out of their investment.

If you would have asked me this 10 years ago,

I think my answer would be different.

But having been a part of academia for almost a decade now and teaching at a high caliber university, my

answer is different.

So back then I would have said, oh, you need to go to a place where, you know, where your major is really good, that you can, you know, learn from really good professors and you have a really great experience and you can get a job after the fact because people don't see that

Brand on your resume and it's going to signal something about you and it's going to open up more doors. I think today my

thinking is a little different because I feel like I have always been taught

or had always been taught to think of college as a vocation as a place where I study

my vocation, right? If I want to be a marketer, I study marketing. If I want to be a writer, I go into writing, right, or a creative

writing, where the case would be, or maybe English. But what I found though, and maybe this is a

bit provocative, I think that college is better seen as a place to learn how to learn.

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