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Does the holy script of a degree confer these qualities?

No, plus the question is a kind of false dichotomy...they present it as either you're college educated and productive/capable/smart or you aren't...it turns out you can be very productive/capable/skilled/smart without ever having gone to college.

What are you reading? Can you link one comment that presented it that way?

Specifically, ggp that you're referring to was expanding on reasons why education is good beyond it's connection to the job market.

> "Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones?"

Exactly. Neither that comment nor its parent said degrees are necessary for education. Both were defending the value of education that extends beyond it's signal to the job market.

The only extent to which people are conflating degrees and education is the empirically obvious observation that most people don't get much actionable education beyond their time in degree programs, individual counterexamples notwithstanding.

They didn't say explicitly...but you have to look at the context of the conversation...perhaps I misread it

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