The Educator’s Guide to Money & College | Andy Schneider

Tyler Gardner (0:00)

Hello, friends, this is Tyler Gardner, welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be. My guest today is a good friend of mine, Andrew Schneider, who I first met at Camp Billings, a non-profit summer camp in Fairleigh, Vermont, where little known fact, we both learned how to plunge toilets, set tables, and generally just be better people than we were at 9 or 10 years old. Andy is a lifelong educator. He began his career teaching English and coaching crew at the high school and university level. After attending business school, he spent several years consulting in corporate America, but ultimately and thankfully found his way back to independent schools where he has now served as CFO for the past 10 years. Father of three, self-proclaimed, highly mediocre triathlete, Yankees season ticket holder, recovering New York Giants fan and firm believer that everyone has a responsibility to educate themselves on the basics of personal finance. I could not agree with him more on this last point. And one of the primary reasons I wanted to have Andy on the show is he has the ability and the desire to work with people to get them to understand more about why finance matters in business, but also in their personal lives. Throughout this conversation, we touch on why he left education, why he ultimately came back to education, what college may or may not look like in 20 years, what college tuition may or may not look like in 20 years, and some of the thinkers and texts that have impacted both of us. And in this episode, you even get to hear what my two bloodhounds have to think about the increase in costs of college tuition because they would not let me edit out their thoughts. So, without further ado, a nuanced and comprehensive conversation with Andy Schneider.

You were an English major in college and you started teaching right after school, but you pivoted over to PWC, Price Waterhouse Cooper. Could you tell me a little bit about that pivot and what gave you the desire to leave teaching that quickly?

Andy Schneider (2:11)

My first job out of college was teaching. I loved Great English at a new England boarding school. And I think one of the reasons I got into teaching, it was one of the only careers that I sort of I knew what it looked like. A lot of jobs, it's hard to imagine what it looks like when you're in college, but any kid who's been in a classroom knows what teaching looks like. And it's sort of easy to envision yourself as a teacher. That was something that felt natural for me. So I got into teaching right out of undergrad and I liked it. I loved it. I'll say I loved it my first year. I liked it my second year and I started to get a little bit tired my third year. And by the fourth year, I hated the kids.

Tyler Gardner (2:43)

The majority of mid career to veteran teachers to whom I speak always say that they actually end up disliking their colleagues. But the kids are what keeps them in it. What made it so you all of a sudden did not enjoy working with our youth?

Andy Schneider (2:56)

Somehow. I was 21 when I started teaching. So by the end of four, I was 25 and I was somehow I was 25, but I was like this get off my lawn old man at 25 I don't know how it happened. Very quickly, you start noticing the same patterns in kids, just in terms of behavior. And it's amazing that the stories and similarities across kids. And I found myself becoming very impatient in a way that I didn't like myself, the way I was reacting, in a lot of self-reflection and ways that at that point, for years, thinking about other opportunities and other things, you sort of get to a point where is this what I'm going to do for the rest of my life? Or is it not? And if it's not, well, then what? One of the things that's interesting about boarding schools, you're not just a teacher, especially when you're right out of college, they throw you in. And this is actually one of the best things about boarding schools. You live in a dorm, you coach three sports. I worked in the admissions office. I helped a little bit with fundraising. You wind up getting a ton of different job experience. For me, business was always something that was super intimidating. My father was in business, was a finance guy by trade, and I always was intimidated by it. But my last year in this school, I was working in the admissions office. Sort of a light bulb went off, said, is this what business is? Is this marketing? And doing financial aid work said, this is not as scary as I thought it was. And it opened a door for me, I think in some ways demystified the idea of business, and made me a little bit more interested in kind of walking through that door and seeing what it had to offer me. I took the GMAT for the first time and really started thinking about business school. And I think if I were to go back, it's still on my hard drive somewhere, but if I were to dust off all of my business school essays and what I thought I wanted to do, they were actually all about academic administration. I thought I wanted to be an academic administrator. To me, the dream job was to be athletic director at a big 10 school or something like that. So that's what I was writing about in my business school essays. And I thought that would have been that was the route. If you wanted to be an administrator, you really needed to know business. Then when you get to business school, everybody wants to be a banker or a consultant. It wasn't all that exciting, but I was lucky enough to find an opportunity as a consultant with PWC.