“Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
A new study, The Education Irony: When College Degrees Lead to Unemployment, Mindless Thinking, Debt, and Despair (Friedman, 2025), exposes a truth long felt across society — that conventional education is failing to prepare people for real life.
Universities, once temples of wisdom, now often produce anxious, binary thinkers burdened with debt and stripped of creative confidence. Yet within this crisis lies an invitation — to redefine what education, empowerment, and wealth truly mean.
For holistic wealth planners, this paper is a mirror. It challenges us to become the educators, mentors, and guides that institutions have failed to be. Here are ten lessons we can take forward.
1. Plan for Wholeness, Not Credentials
Education should create capable, ethical citizens — not compliant job seekers. The same is true for wealth planning.
A holistic planner helps clients cultivate character, conscience, and capability, not just financial portfolios. True prosperity arises from alignment between purpose, livelihood, and well-being.
2. Teach Clients to Think, Not React
The study warns that universities often teach binary thinking — “right or wrong,” “us versus them.”
Holistic planners can break this cycle by modelling cyclical, reflective thinking — the essence of the GAME Plan (Goals, Actions, Means, Execution). Help clients see nuance, balance contradictions, and plan their lives before their money.
3. Practise Deep Listening and Dialogue
Mindless thinking and superficial listening have replaced critical thought in classrooms.
Our profession must restore them. Through deep listening, we help clients surface their unspoken fears and rediscover their own wisdom. This is not financial advice — it’s financial healing.
4. Champion Diversity of Thought
The study critiques how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programmes have become ideological rather than integrative.
Holistic wealth planning celebrates diversity in perspective, not propaganda — embracing every story, from the factory floor to the boardroom. Inclusion begins with curiosity, not quotas.
5. Transform Conflict into Coherence
Many institutions now reward outrage rather than resolution.
A good planner does the opposite — transforming friction within families, businesses, and belief systems into understanding. Our role is to hold space for dialogue until peace, not polarity, emerges.
6. Cultivate Intellectual Humility
Friedman argues that arrogance and certainty are the enemies of learning.
Likewise, holistic wealth planners should replace “expertise as authority” with humility as service. Admit uncertainty. Invite co-creation. When we drop the mask of the all-knowing adviser, clients find their own power.
7. Foster Lifelong Learning
Colleges are stuck in industrial-age paradigms, while the world demands agility.
Our clients — and we ourselves — must be learners for life. Encourage curiosity, experimentation, and the courage to reinvent. Wealth is not what you know — it’s how fast you can learn and adapt.
8. Anchor Ethics in Critical Thinking
Teaching ethics without critical thought, Friedman notes, leads to moral blindness.
Holistic wealth planning must help people make values-based rather than rule-based decisions. Ask: “What serves life, fairness, and truth?” rather than “What’s permitted under the rules?”
9. Integrate Strengths of Heart, Mind, and Will
Angela Duckworth’s research (cited in the study) identifies three pillars of character:
- Heart: empathy, generosity, integrity
- Mind: curiosity, humility, creativity
- Will: courage, self-control, grit
Holistic planners nurture all three. Together, they form the architecture of Kokoro — a balanced life of meaning and mastery.
10. Redefine Education as Empowerment
Friedman warns higher education risks the “Kodak effect” — obsolescence through arrogance.
The same applies to financial planning. Those who cling to extraction models will fade. The future belongs to educators who empower — those who help people plan their lives first, and use money as a servant, not a master.
🌍 From Education to Empowerment
The Academy of Life Planning and its movements — Planning My Life, Financial Life Coach, M-POWER — exist to close the gap this study exposes.
We believe the next era of education will not be built in universities, but in communities of conscience — where ordinary people become their own planners, thinkers, and change-makers.
When we teach people to plan their lives, we teach them to live free.
Steve Conley
Founder, Academy of Life Planning
Rebuilding trust in financial planning — one empowered life at a time.
Academy of Life Planning 