If you still think college is the key to success, meet Zach Yadegari.
At just 18 years old, Zach built an AI-powered app called Cal AI that lets users snap a photo of their meal and instantly logs calories and macronutrients.
Pretty useful. (Apparently $30 million useful!)
Since launching eight months ago, Cal AI has earned over five million downloads, brings in $2 million per month, and boasts 4.8-star ratings with tens of thousands of glowing reviews in both app stores.
Not bad for a teenager. Not bad for anyone!
So… what happened when he applied to college?
He got rejected by 15 of the 18 schools he applied to.
“Well,” you may say, “A lot of those schools have pretty high academic standards. They can’t just let him in because he made an app!”
That's fair. Let’s check on his academic accomplishments.
He had a 4.0 GPA, a 34 on the ACT (top 5% in the country), and submitted a personal statement recalling teaching himself to code at age seven, how he built and scaled Cal AI, and what it was like to hire his first employee.
Oh.
He even admitted that while he once thought he didn’t need college, he had since come to see it as a valuable place for him to collaborate and grow.
Honest, thoughtful… and apparently, disqualifying.
The truth is, the university system doesn’t know what to do with people like Zach.
He’s already doing the very thing higher ed claims to prepare kids to do—solve real problems, create value, build something out of nothing. And yet, the system passed him over in favor of applicants who, let’s be honest, probably can’t even balance their bank account.
To be fair, you can’t really blame them.
Why would schools want a kid who could just pay for college out of pocket without binding themselves to the government loan program for the rest of their lives?
Ha.
This is exactly why I wrote my book Skip College—because stories like Zach’s (although Zach’s is pretty impressive) aren’t really the exception anymore. They represent a growing trend of smart, successful, entrepreneurial-thinking kids and their parents who are realizing that colleges don't really want people like them.
The world is changing, but the college-industrial complex refuses to change with it. And why would they? The degree inflation scheme they’ve been running for a couple of decades has made them very very wealthy—outcomes be damned.
This is one of the reasons we built Tuttle Twins Academy—to give kids the tools to thrive without waiting for permission from the ivory towered gatekeepers who think GPAs and club memberships matter more than character, creativity, competence, or actual accomplishment.
We just launched our brand-new economics courses inside the Academy, and for a very limited time, you can enroll for up to $60 off!
It features a star-studded cast of teachers who provide kids and teens with lessons on how the real world works—how markets function, how incentives shape behavior, why value creation matters, and what it means to think like an entrepreneur.
Not for a test. Not for a grade. For real life.
Because the real world doesn’t need more assembly line graduates who blindly follow the “rules.”
It needs builders and makers—entrepreneurial thinkers—who are ready to rewrite them.
Check out the Academy today and give your kids the kind of education that actually prepares them for life.
— Connor
