The questions were asking if people felt a degree was required to get a well paying job.
I feel like if you think of extended study purely for financial gain you might be doing education wrong.
I feel like if you think of extended study purely for financial gain you might be doing education wrong.
Thing is, employers don't leave another choice. It's either jobs on the level of flipping burgers, the trades, or it's going to college because even mediocre paper-pusher jobs require a college degree these days.
The reasons for that are pretty simple:
- college degrees save employers money on training cost, as the students have to shoulder it (you know, it used to be a red flag for scam jobs if you were required to pay for the privilege of getting the job - but with college, it's accepted that we saddle 18 year olds with five figures of debt)
- they are a versatile proxy... they weed out people from entire classes of society (the poor, the disabled, people of color, people with mental or physical health issues - all of that has close correlations with lower chances of academic degrees) completely legally
- they reduce risk of hiring a "dud" - if you can't get out of bed reliably in the morning and stick to deadlines you won't get an academic degree, so requiring degrees weeds out this as well with no financial risk to the employers.
There is only one way out: legally mandating that requiring a college degree for a job is only allowed if there is a material need for the knowledge acquired during a matching academic degree.
Also the result you get out of college very often mirrors that mindset: if you are there to primarily learn and expand your skillset, I'd say college is virtually always worth it.
I studied at 6 different universities (with varying teaching quality and approaches) and always learnt tons.
In reality the benefits are far closer to purely financial gain than purely learning, and personally I found that the structure of university severely limited the amount I could learn.
If the time doesn't allow that, make friends with people in those courses/classes and ask them to forward to you the slides/presentations of their classes (or trade yours for their if they want to).
Contact professors working on projects you are interested in, regardless of whether they are your professors and/or if it is your major. Since you'd be generally unpaid, you might have lots of freedom to modify the project as you need/please, or join what they are already doing.
Check out facilities/available materials and other tools that the university provides.
If you do that, you'll learn several orders of magnitude more than most students there.
I did that pretty much at every uni I went to, and still managed to do some good amount of partying and part-time job.
If I'm going to audit whatever classes I want, why would I even enroll in the university? Chances are if I asked nicely I could sit in, talk to the professors and even use some facilities.
Part of the package with university is the structure. If you're saying people should throw that away, why are they even going to university?
University is almost always "worth it" in terms of absolute gain, but I think its alpha over other approaches is very dubious when it comes to how much you will learn and improve your skillset. Depending on your goals, it can be a very poor learning environment.