Transcript
Intro
Stephan Shipe: Welcome back to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. This week, a listener with $18 million under management is paying his AUM advisor over $200,000 a year and was told he can’t possibly handle a portfolio that size on his own. We dig into whether there is really a threshold where self-management breaks down. Then a family with a longtime nanny on payroll is buying her a vehicle. Now that the daily drive to school has changed the job, we walk through how to handle title, insurance, and the choices that would make this clean for both sides. In our From the Field segment, we welcome back Lindsay Tanne Howe, founder and CEO of LogicPrep, for a conversation about how education is increasingly driving where families choose to live and how AI is reshaping both the college process and experience. So let’s go ahead and start with question one.
Question 1 – Is There a Threshold Where Self-Managing an $18 Million Portfolio Breaks Down?
Stephan Shipe: I have about $18 million with a wirehouse advisor and I’m paying just over 1% on AUM, so call it $200,000 a year. I sat down recently and actually added up what I’ve paid since I sold my company and the number is staggering. When I brought it up to my advisor and floated the idea of managing it myself or moving to flat fee, he told me there was no way I could handle a portfolio this size on my own. Is he right? What’s the threshold for self-management?
What we need to do is disentangle this idea that managing money is the same as getting advice on money, because the advice on money is really where the complexity comes in. The management of the money is relatively easy, especially with the changes in technology that have happened over the past, call it 30 years. You used to have to, if you wanted to buy Apple stock, call a broker, deal with all of this, and go through it — they would buy it for you and execute. Now I can pick up my phone, jump on Fidelity, place a trade, and buy Apple in three seconds, or sell it and not own it anymore. So it’s become significantly easier to access financial markets for retail investors, which is what you and I are. So that is one myth we need to dispel early here — that the management can’t happen.
I think what gets conflated is people say, well, I understand the management piece, but I need the advice piece. And that’s where you have to be careful because you have to look and see whether or not the $200,000 or so that you’re paying is actually worth the advice piece that you’re getting, because that’s a heck of a lot of advice unless you have a lot of complexity. And the complexity doesn’t come from the number that’s in the account. What I mean by that is if you have a $5 million account and a $15 million account, the account doesn’t get three times more difficult to manage, even though the fee you’re paying goes up by three times. I know there are fee breaks and everything and they’re going to give you 85 bips or 80 bips as opposed to 1%. But it still doesn’t move linearly. The whole AUM model is a linear relationship between the fee you pay and the amount of money that’s in the account, which from an outside-looking-in perspective seems fine. The problem is, in my opinion, that starts to break down quickly when account values start to increase. If you have a million dollars in your account and you’re paying $10,000 a year for a manager, that’s probably not that bad. I don’t think that’s too egregious. Now, if you have a $3 million account versus your $1 million account, now you’re paying $30,000 a year. It’s really hard for me to justify that you’re getting three times the value from $1 million to $3 million, unless your life became significantly more complex during that time. And that continues — you go to three to six, six to twelve, twelve to twenty-four.
Where it starts to get interesting is in the spot that you’re in. You start to get to this $18 million number and you say, well, this seems like a lot of money, and maybe I don’t know what I’m doing with it. Now, does that mean I recommend you take the $18 million and run it all yourself and never talk to any other advisor? Absolutely not. What I’m saying is you could go out, handle your $18 million, find a really good attorney, find a really good CPA — which you probably already have — and find a financial advisor who just charges you a flat fee for the advice as opposed to actually managing the account. And I think you could manage it.
If your answer is, I don’t know, that’s a lot of stuff to handle, I don’t know if I could actually handle the trades and place the trades and everything else — the big question is, is it worth $200,000 to you? Because if you say, well, that’s going to be a lot more work, how much more work are we talking about? You’re going to have to put in some more effort, maybe place the trades yourself and rebalance a couple of times a year. How much time are you actually putting into this? My guess is you’re putting in three to four days max worth of time. And that includes you getting into some painful phone conversations with the broker you’re at trying to transfer money around and sitting on hold for a while. So let’s say at worst, five days to manage that — that’s $40,000 a day that you would essentially be getting paid or saving if you just spent those five days doing it. I think that’s a good use of your time.
Not only is it a good use of your money now, but what happens to you 10 years from now? Money doubles every 10 years on an average return of 7% — Rule of 72 — which shows that even if you’re pulling money from the account now, what happens if you spend some of it? What if this account gets up to $30 million in the next decade? What does that do to your fees? Now you’re talking $300,000 plus, and you’d say, man, 10 years ago I really wish I had spent those five days to save $200,000 a year and manage the account by myself, so I don’t have to continue paying $200,000 to $300,000 a year. That’s $2 to $3 million you’re going to pay in fees over the next 10 years, which I know is preaching to the choir in this one, because you’ve already done the math. You’ve seen how much this compounds. It’s not just that you don’t have to pay it today — it’s $200,000 today that you save, which in 10 years turns to $400,000 with that average. So if that’s the scenario, how much do you miss out not only today but five, ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future from all of these fees continuing to compound? That’s where I really have trouble with the scalability of that AUM model. It works really well for the advisor — the scaling works great there. I don’t think it works as well for the client.
Now the other part of your question is, what’s the threshold for self-management? And this is an interesting question because it depends a little bit on the complexity, but I don’t want to give you the it-depends answer. In other words, if you have $10 million sitting in an account that’s all in cash in one brokerage account with no complexity, that’s not bad at all, right? I don’t see that falling apart. You have $20 or $30 million in that same scenario. What starts to change is you start to hit that estate tax limit, which for a married couple you’re right around that $30 million. Once you start risking going into that, then there’s some tax efficiency that’s needed. Even at $10 to $20 million, tax loss harvesting becomes important, being more attuned to what the estate concerns would be. All of that makes perfect sense. Doesn’t necessarily mean you need AUM at that point. What it means is you just need some advisors around you to help with that.
Now, where does it kick in where you need someone to manage the money? That I think is what you’re getting at. Where does self-management reach the point of, this is too big for me, I need to bring in someone to actually manage the day-to-day operations? My opinion, that starts around $100 to $200 million. Once you start to hit that point, you run into an interesting situation where you don’t have to go to an advisor and pay $1 to $2 million a year in AUM fees. You would just hire your own advisor, right? You would go hire a financial advisor who does nothing but look at your accounts. That’s when you start to see family offices generate, because they do the same math that you’re doing and say, hey, I have $100 million now, or I have $150 million. I’m about to pay $800,000, $700,000 in fees this year even with all the fee breaks. I could go hire my own advisor. I could go hire an attorney, a CPA, and a bookkeeper who do all of this for me throughout the year, and they only work for me and my family. And that’s going to make a lot of sense because when you get to $100 to $200 million, you’ve got some stuff going on, right? You either have businesses, you have real estate. There’s some other things happening here where you don’t just have one account with $100 million in it. There’s more complexity that you’re going to need specialized advice on. You’re going to be gifting to kids. You’re going to be setting up different types of trust structures, different assets, multiple homes. There’s a lot being thrown in here where you would really find a lot of value in having someone dedicated only to you and your finances, as opposed to saying I’m going to pay close to a million dollars a year in fees and be one of the clients of this advisor who’s working for me.
So that’s when I think that starts to break apart. But for $18 million, I don’t see any issues from at least this limited information of you being able to handle this yourself with the right type of support around you, especially with the technology available today.
Question 2 – How to Handle a Vehicle for a Full-Time Nanny: Title, Insurance, and the Cleanest Approach
Stephan Shipe: We have a great full-time nanny on payroll for just over a year. Our older daughter has just started private school. It’s a 40-minute drive each way, and now our nanny is doing two round trips a day plus the usual errands. It’s a lot of mileage on her personal car. We want to get her a safe new vehicle to use for the job, but I don’t know the right way to do it. Do we buy it and put it in our insurance policy? Do we title it to her?
So lots of different options when we get into the concept of really having employees for your personal life. And that’s what you have going on now. This happens when we start having nannies — it tends to come up once you bring in the car aspect. But when you start having housekeepers and somebody helping take care of the yard, once you start having full-time people working for you, you have to start looking at this like a business arrangement and not just paying somebody on the side.
The risk of what you’re talking about doing is that insurance starts to become a big problem. And this is where we tend to see a lot of people get tripped up, because they go and say, well, I’m just going to go buy a car and the nanny can use the car and drive around the kids, it’s not going to be a big deal. The problem is, is she insured on the car? Well, now you can add her to the insurance, but then you say, well, if we’re adding her to the insurance and she’s running errands throughout the day — which is the key issue in this component — if she starts doing that and she’s running errands, then are you hiring her as a driver? Not necessarily just as a nanny. And as soon as you start putting her literally in the driver’s seat of this situation, you start running into liability issues where the insurance companies can come in and say, well, you have her driving a personal vehicle, that’s your personal vehicle, we’re not going to cover business work that she’s doing in the personal vehicle. So there’s going to be this delineation of what is commercial use and what is personal use for this vehicle. That’s where you run into some issues.
The cleanest method would be for you to have a vehicle for her to use. You can either title it in her name and have some sort of business arrangement, like a loan to her that if she’s no longer working for you, the loan is automatically called — or something along those lines — or you have her keep her car and then you pay mileage on it. So she logs how many miles she takes throughout the week, sends it back to you, and you pay the mileage rate for that. Super simple. And then you ensure that her insurance allows her to use her vehicle for her job, and they’ll still cover it. If the insurance that she has says yes, you can use it for personal use and you can use it for your job, not a problem. Then you can go and confirm that her insurance is covering her correctly and follow up with helping her financially get the vehicle — whether that’s some sort of advance payment, whether that’s some sort of loan. That’s relatively easy to structure with an attorney, to put it in her name and still protect you from the fact that you buy her a new car and then the next day she quits — that ends up being the risk there.
The way that gives you the most control but also the most complexity — and I don’t know that it really makes a lot of sense here, I kind of like that second option a lot better — is you could go buy this vehicle as part of a business, have it truly for business use. She’s an employee of the business and you start running this more like a household business. That way you control the insurance, you control the vehicle, you have optimal control in that scenario. But the second option is definitely what I think you should be looking into, which is, is there a way for her to use a car that’s her car that you help her buy — which is one separate issue — and then follow up that issue with, all right, now that you have a safe car that you can drive our kids around in, how do we go about making sure that we pay you back for the mileage you’re putting on your car? That’s going to be relatively easy to do. And then we just check the box that says show us the insurance that you have for coverage and make sure that coverage allows you to use that car personally and for your job. And if you’re able to tick those three boxes off — getting the car, paying her for mileage and use, and having the insurance protection — I think that makes a lot more sense than you running the risk of buying a car personally, letting her use it for the kids, and then potentially having an issue where somebody says, well, she’s actually a driver, she’s doing all these errands and other household chores around the house, so that’s a business use, that’s not personal use.
From the Field – How Education Is Shaping Where Families Plant Roots, and What AI Is Doing to the College Process
In our From the Field segment, we look at how education is increasingly shaping where families choose to plant roots and what that means for long-term planning. We’re joined by Lindsay Tanne Howe, founder and CEO of LogicPrep, a premier college advisory firm that helps students tell their stories and gain admission to top universities. Lindsay joined us last year to talk about Ivy League admission strategy, and we’re thrilled to have her back.
Stephan Shipe: Lindsay, welcome back to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. What’s new? What’s going on? Since last year, everything’s moving so fast. What’s been on your radar since we last spoke?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Thank you. Yeah, so as you mentioned, we’re seeing just an increasingly mobile and global population of families. And we’re seeing education sort of underpin a lot of the relocation decisions that families are making. We’re seeing this in the secondary school selection process in terms of where do I choose to live, where do I choose to send my child to school, how do I decide if this is going to be a good move for my family. And then actually in the college selection piece where we’re seeing students cast a much wider net in terms of international scope, looking at colleges outside the U.S. It’s been pretty fascinating.
Stephan Shipe: So when you talk about the actual move and everything, you’re talking about everybody picking up and moving to where their child’s going to go to college, and that’s dictating where they’re going? Is this like the pre-retirement move of you’re only allowed to choose these locations because that’s where mom and dad want to retire and they’d like you to move there?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Well, it’s funny, I did talk to a family not too long ago that said, you know, I think we’re going to go explore Bocconi in Milan for our son because we’re kind of thinking about maybe retiring in a village in Italy. So that would be the exception case, but it’s not unheard of. What I’m alluding to more is families are increasingly mobile. Remote work is much more of a reality than it was, let’s say, five or ten years ago. And families have more optionality. And what we’re seeing is parents come to us earlier in the schooling trajectory for their children and say, we’re contemplating a family move for career reasons, for lifestyle reasons. And we want to be really thoughtful and mindful about how this is going to map to educational planning for our child. Are the schools in this new location good enough to give them the kind of college access that they might hopefully aspire to one day? Or even, is there an advantage to moving to a school ecosystem that’s maybe been historically less competitive, less saturated with students who are aiming for the most highly selective colleges? Like that classic cocktail party example is talking to a family in Greenwich, Connecticut who says, we have a ski house in Montana or Idaho. Could my child do better coming out of high school there? Are they going to stand out more in the admissions process? And sometimes the answer is kind of yes.
The Big Fish, Small Pond Strategy in College Admissions
Stephan Shipe: Can you talk about that a little bit more? That’s really interesting — the idea that you’d almost do the opposite of what most people would think. Instead of going for the areas that have all the great schools where everyone’s going to Ivy League colleges and doing really well, you’re saying, well, if I go over here and no one’s going to these schools, I’m going to be the only one. How does that stand-out aspect work? Because you’d clearly stand out at the high school level. The person over here may be really smart, but how do admissions teams at universities look at that? Do they have lists of high schools in these smaller cities and say, hey, we’ve got to hit our Idaho quota, so we need to make sure we’re pulling in enough people from there?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Yes, right. It’s sort of a big fish, small pond. Yeah, so let me contextualize and explain how applications are evaluated. These are college applications, and typically they’re read on a regional basis. So there’s an individual on the university side who’s responsible for understanding a particular territory. And they are well-versed in the educational landscape of that area, what high schools are there, what is the quality of instruction and the level of rigor of the courses. And so they are reading with that context in mind.
I think for some students, it is easier to stand out in an environment that is a little bit less historically academically oriented, in a pool full of legacy students, for example, where students and families have been planning for the college process since practically infancy. The flip of that though is it’s really important to make sure that your child is exposed to the appropriate level of challenge and rigor in high school. So for example, just signing up to send your child to a rural public high school somewhere in the middle of the country may not be all that advantageous because they’re not going to have access to coursework that’s going to sufficiently demonstrate their level of academic strength.
Stephan Shipe: Gotcha. And how does that impact from an international perspective too? I guess both on choice of school from what you’re talking about, but also this concept of families moving with kids before college or during college. Has that changed at all since we last talked, or are there any trends there?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Yeah, so I’m seeing sort of two things. On the high school side, it’s not new that we’ll have families come to us at some point in the student’s high school trajectory and say, we’re contemplating sending our child for a year abroad, maybe a boarding school in another country. Wouldn’t it be such a great experience for them to make friends and learn a new language? What is shifting somewhat is that parents are saying, well, maybe we’ll join. Why not make this a family adventure? And again, I think that’s a function of remote work and the flexibility that’s afforded. So for example, I talked to a family not long ago that decided to spend a year traveling with their three children on a world tour, and they did a version of homeschooling. And that’s more accessible and more possible today than it’s ever been in the past. They’re now back embedded in the more traditional schooling their kids had been doing previously. It totally changed their son’s approach to the college application. He’s now applying to universities that have campuses abroad — NYU, for example, has a campus in Asia and one in the Middle East — and he’s even talking about wanting to be a travel writer professionally. So that’s one interesting example of a family making a decision that has educational implications and also real personal reverberations as well.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, I can see how that’s a lot easier for your pre-college years, because you have a little bit more control over where your kids are going to go. But I imagine for families with multiple children, that starts getting risky when you pick up and move to a location for some university — banking or having to gamble on the fact of all of your kids getting into that university, or wanting to, otherwise you’ve got to keep moving. That seems like a big risk. Is that common in the sense of, whenever you start seeing families move, I imagine they’re taking a lot of factors into account because you have to find the one-size-fits-all approach to a location that fits all the children’s needs, as opposed to going all in on one kid?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: No, I think you’re right. Most families are mindful of the bigger picture. And when families are contemplating international moves, they’re typically looking at international schools, schools that have IB programs or even offer AP classes, so that the credits and the schooling are more transferable. And we are seeing the rise of international campuses in locations that are attracting more global families. For example, TASIS, which is one of the most renowned European boarding school groups, just opened a campus outside of Lisbon. And Lisbon is actually a hub where we’ve seen a lot of families relocate in recent years for a confluence of reasons when we’re talking about lifestyle and opportunity. And that’s a great example of the education catching up.
Stephan Shipe: Do you see that as an issue for families who move, let’s say, from the U.S. internationally for schooling, but then hoping to have their kids back in the United States for actual university education? Does that make things different, or does it really depend on the choice of schools internationally?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: It really depends, and that’s often why it’s not at all unusual for families to come to us as they’re thinking about a potential move abroad or even domestically to say, what are the implications? Is this school going to better position my child for college applications? Could it disadvantage them? And we sort of play it out because it can go different ways. Certainly coming from an international school is probably a safer bet. The curriculum is better understood. The level of rigor may be higher. But not always. Sometimes a local school in a different language is an amazing cultural experience for the student and family. And sometimes those are the most well-regarded local schools, and so that can carry weight in the college application process as well. So that’s really why when we’re consulting with families, we’re not meeting them in the final phase of, OK, let’s execute on these college applications. We’re starting to engage when the children are at the tail end of middle school, early high school, to say, how do we maximize the high school trajectory and how do we set that child up for success in whatever environment they end up being in?
Stephan Shipe: Is that so — that’s your kind of go-to. I know we talked about this a little bit the last time, around eighth grade being that prime time to start making these decisions. But is that kind of the line that you would draw? Not saying it’s impossible to start later than that. But that’s the ideal point to start making these decisions for school, which means you’d have to start making location decisions before that time, or even in the earlier middle school years so that the transition is a little bit easier.
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Yes, I think you’re characterizing that correctly. I always say to families, the right time to engage is really the right time for your child, because different children are kind of waking up at different stages of this process. But I think if we want to be the most proactive, the most strategic, the most intentional, then the ideal time to really begin laying the groundwork is the tail end of middle school into early high school. And there are a number of reasons for that. One is around course selection and course planning, and that’s embedded within the context of school selection, right? Making sure that the student has access to challenging high-level classes that are going to showcase their strengths. And as we can all appreciate, one course kind of builds on the next, right? You need to have access to a particular set of classes in order to progress to that next level. And then the other piece of this is the narrative development component, right? Colleges are looking for a cohesive through line for each applicant — what have they done, what have they contributed, what impact have they made? And 11th grade is not the time to go all in, right? That narrative is the natural consequence of multiple years of learning and growth and exploration. And that’s really what we’re cultivating in our students.
How AI Is Changing the College Application Process
Stephan Shipe: How does that change in the admissions process? Because what you just described is very different from where I think a lot of people think about the admissions process. They think, I need to submit my grades and I need a really good essay and I’m going to submit those things and it’s going to go through some algorithm and I’m going to get chosen or not chosen for the university. But what you’re saying is almost like the resume approach — you’re looking for this path that shows a thoughtful approach, not just, it’s my junior year, I need to go volunteer for a lot of things that are all random and throw them in just to fill the paper. But you see this kind of course they’ve taken for four or five years. How does the AI stuff we’re seeing now factor in? Because there are universities using a lot of technology to screen applications, to screen different candidates. How many times are human eyes being put on each application? And then is this a weird situation where, if essays are still a prevalent portion of the whole process, how are universities adapting to the changes where you could have ten applicants and Claude wrote all ten of their essays, and they all sound great?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: It’s such an interesting and complicated moment. I think I’ll backtrack for a moment to hit on contextually some of what you raised — why does narrative even matter? What’s the point here? And I think at the most selective universities, as the number of applicants rises and acceptance rates drop, there’s almost an expectation that most students will be applying with the very strongest grades and test scores. So then the question becomes, what is differentiating about that student? And that’s where the storytelling component is so paramount. And why beginning earlier to craft a genuine and authentic narrative is essential. Because I am a true believer that there is no magic formula to this. The perfect applicant doesn’t exist. The perfect applicant is the best, most deeply engaged, most highly committed version of any particular child. And obviously that has to build over time.
So that brings us to the essay component. The essays are the culmination of that story. Without those summer jobs and volunteer opportunities, there’s no raw material to craft a compelling essay. You need the essay fodder, the essay inspiration. In terms of the AI of it, we say to our students that this is an issue of both integrity and strategy. Colleges ask students during the application process to sign off that the work is authentically and originally their own. And so that obviously raises some flags about the use of AI in this process. But putting that aside, they’re also screening for voice, for specificity, for uniqueness. And so it’s an issue of strategy as well. Can AI be a helpful brainstorming tool? Absolutely. But it would be wildly disadvantageous for a student to submit a flattened essay that looks and sounds like anybody else, because the whole point is that it’s their opportunity to showcase themselves. And maybe there’s even some benefit in being a little bit rough around the edges in a world where AI is doing the flattening.
Stephan Shipe: How fast are universities adapting to all of this, whether in their use of it or their ability to incorporate any type of screening into whether or not that affects their decisions?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Fairly slowly, I would say. Some schools have implemented AI tools to screen really for numbers. Some are more forthcoming than others about their use. For example, UNC has talked about how they’re using it in the evaluation process, but Duke down the road is saying, we’re not doing that. So it definitely varies school by school. And then from the educational perspective too, colleges are deciding in real time how they want to integrate AI into their curriculum. Some schools are in the very early phases of thinking about, how do we now test students once they arrive here to really elicit the information that we want to? And so schools are thinking about whether oral exams are something they want to bring back rather than traditional essays. And colleges too are playing around with the notion of implementing AI-focused majors. Northwestern University, for example, is one such school that’s in the process of bringing that into their curriculum. But it’s highly variable.
Stephan Shipe: And when you mentioned a couple of schools there on the AI side, to circle back a little bit on your hubs of where people are moving — I imagine that starts to drive where decisions are being made. Because depending on the speed of technology change, if a school is embracing it, that seems to be something that parents and families are looking at as a little bit more comfortable. Because one of the things I’m hearing in meetings regularly is, we don’t know what jobs are going to look like for our kids in the future. And so now people are looking at universities through a new lens — not of, well, all these schools are really good schools, but now it’s, which of these schools are actually going to be changing their curriculum to take into account all of these factors? How are you seeing that being balanced with the more geographic preferences? Is there any overlap there, or is one driving the other?
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Yes. It’s a great question. And I think colleges are all trying to figure out how to keep up and also how to attract the strongest applicants in a world that is rapidly changing. And so what we’re seeing from a college perspective is a rise in popularity of schools that are being increasingly thoughtful and forward-looking about practical, hands-on experience. For example, Northeastern has a co-op program that actually gives students work experience as part of the curriculum. It’s really embedded in the undergraduate experience. And Northeastern has become increasingly popular, increasingly selective over the last decade. Certainly that’s been accelerated in the last handful of years, and I would attribute that largely to the kinds of trends that you’re describing. And then trying to sort of follow Northeastern’s cues, we just noticed that Fordham University in New York City just announced that for the class of 2029, they’re going to guarantee an internship, a work experience, or a research opportunity for every graduating student. So I think that is one of the ways colleges are really looking to remain relevant in our shifting world.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, I think that makes a lot more sense and I’m happy to hear it, because academia moves extremely slowly in pretty much everything. So to see that — and I think it’s really easy to throw out there and say, well, we have a major now, or we have an elective you can take that is AI, and that’s really not solving any of those problems we’ve been talking about. What’s actually solving it is a completely new way to think about curriculum and how you’re actually teaching courses and everything else. So that’s really good to hear.
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Yes. And I would also just add, because I consider myself sort of a proponent of the liberal arts — I was an English major myself — we’re certainly seeing a reduction in the funding and resources for many of those disciplines at a number of schools. Syracuse University, for example, just announced that they’re shutting down a number of liberal arts departments and laying off professors. But I would actually argue that in the world as it’s becoming, those skills that come from a liberal arts education are more essential than ever. The ability to think critically, interpret information, collaborate well with peers, express an opinion — all of that which the liberal arts teaches is no less important, and perhaps more important, when we think about the soft skills in an AI-driven world.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, I think I buy that argument of it being more of an issue. Because if you’d asked me — with experience of over a decade in academia — 10 years ago, that wasn’t the case. There was a big push toward business school, computer science. And now you’re starting to see that shift. I don’t think it’s happened yet — there’s still this push toward hard skills and technical skills — but we’re starting to see a lot of that shift. I think you’re right that if we were to look at that trend for the next 10 years, we’d shift back to a more liberal arts education.
Where Families Are Moving — The New Educational Hubs
So as we wrap up today, give us five of these new hubs that you’re looking at, cities where people are looking to move. You mentioned Lisbon — I don’t know if that makes your top five or if that’s just out there.
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Let’s see. I’ll call that my top five. We’re seeing some action in Milan. South Florida is booming — actually, it’s so funny, the schools have such long wait lists that local billionaires are actually investing in new campuses. Jeff Green built a school in Palm Beach. Stephen Ross is working on forming two new campuses in South Florida just to accommodate the influx of families. So that includes Miami and Wellington. And then we’re also seeing families relocating to what were historically vacation communities as a primary residence — more families making roots in the Hamptons, Lake Tahoe, and other former outposts.
Stephan Shipe: Very good. Well, those all sound like good places. I don’t blame them. All right. Well, Lindsay, pleasure as always. Thank you very much for coming on to the show and sharing some of the newest trends. We appreciate it.
Lindsay Tanne Howe: Yeah, I agree. Thank you.
Outro
Stephan Shipe: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week!
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