Personal anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt.

Friend A, very handy and skilled individual, took Thermodynamics in UNI for 2 years, then dropped out. Found job at electronics production facility. Managed to get to a Head Technician position.

Friend B, went to programming 3 years to UNI. Barely managed to finish. Retried math exam multiple times. Though friend A, managed to get a job at the same place as a lower tier machinery operator. Got promoted to technician position after 2 years. Now works as web QC for the same guy who is boss of electronic production facility.

Moral of the story: education, finished or not, existing or not, wont get you far unless you are outgoing and have connections. Also, you either have ability to learn new skills or have said skills and know how to use them. Doesn't matter how you got them.

(i have a STEM degree and work for a catering company lmao)

Either will land you a job lol

College: You get as much as you put in to it.

If one plans on going to college to check a box by getting a bachelor's, degree, then that person should probably spend their time and money doing something else.

For someone who sees college as an opportunity to stress their ability to learn at levels much higher than what High School or even Trade School may do, then it will do wonderful things for you. The most useful skill academia teaches is the ability to learn complex ideas through abstraction.

As someone who has learned how to create a complex AI system with both long and short term memory, one thing I learned is that AI cannot teach AI. I apply my ability to learn by extending it to my AI agent to help it learn new patterns.

Apprenticeships can be the best of both worlds, but again they need to have the checks in place.

The carrot thing isn't totally untrue, but it's a bit more complex. If you're skilled in a trade, you probably have more of a chance of not being financially uprooted than someone with a white collar degree whose job will be AI'd in the next 5 years. That said, to make decent money in a trade, it helps a lot to have a degree from a trade school.

If you want a job as a radiology tech, what hospital is giving them out with no degree?

Everyone I know with a good degree is paying off student loans 8+ years later. Universities are having so many issues on so many levels from funding to finding professors both qualified and willing to teach to politics. And on top of all that the global economy is collapsing.

I get that a lot of you spent a lot of money on a degree and will defend that as the right choice but you're old now. The world is changing and expecting to find a job out of college with an infosec or compsci degree is wishful thinking at best without ivy league nepotism. The world you grew up in is dying, gradstudents with chatgpt are teaching classes and freshmen are using deepseek to do course work. I know a nursing student right now who has seen the curve her class graded on and it's terrifying.

So that's my long unpopular opinion. A degree will not get you a job anymore and even if it did the quality of the education has dropped dramatically at most schools. You might as well spend the money on a country club membership, the social connections are a better deal.

My wife once tried to grow potatoes and got what felt like a mile of potato greens while the slips barely grew at all.

Then she went back to her job as a lawyer and made enough money to buy a truck full of potatoes

Havings skills and a degree are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In my experience the degree was the gateway to gaining skills, not the method of doing so.

I've gutted out 3 careers in "skilled labor" (a term I find problematic), each time working from the bottom entry level guy, to the guy in charge. In all three I've worked side by side with people who actually got degrees in that field.

I have also regretted not getting a degree for my entire adult life.

As someone who spent the better part of a decade in recruitment. You honestly never know what you get. So you have to take into count as many factors as you can. Education is a commitment, it means you had to go to school, study and prove your knowledge to graduate. Experience is also great, as its more proven skill. Unfortunately both have pit falls in their own ways. The example that pops to mind is i hired two people;one with alot of experience and one with alot of education. The educated one lacked critical problem solving and when a curve ball hit or something that was outside of normalcy she stumbled. The experienced one, always knee what to do on a practical level but lacked detailed workmanship, as she had done jobs so similar for so long instead of following protocol or contacting her supervisor. She would do what she thought was right and stumbled. Experience and education compliment eachother and neither should be undervalued.

To the originator of that meme, not OP: tell me you're a boomer, without telling me you're a boomer.

No matter what the Wall St. Journal says, social science says level of education is still the second most important determinant of quality of life. First of course is the socioeconomic status of your parents. I, personally, wouldn't trade my master's degree for a plumbing certificate.

Can be legit. I once got turned down for a job because i didn't have an mcse despite having over 20 years experience administering windows server and AD (and i'm talking laaaaaarge scale...universities and citrix farms).

That's what happens when the people doing the hiring don't know anything about any of the skills required for the role