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.

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.

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

I understand both sides here. I'm a technician who worked as an engineer in the past. Working on getting my degree. The plant's electrical engineer wanted nothing to do with our 24VDC power supply problems. Isn't that her JOB. Us three technicians have probably 100 years of experience, combined. We figured it out

When I had to hire people, I was much more interested in seeing a portfolio than a degree.

It depends on what the job is though. I definitely want my doctor to have a degree

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.

well i grow actual carrots and what you actually get is both

Reminds me of what the guys in construction driving around in lifted trucks with blue lives matter and we the people stickers who’s dads got them a six figure job right out of high school in a union that is run like a white supremisist gang would say

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

Most jobs that require degrees rarely require skills/knowledge learned in college/uni aside from sci/tech/engineering because the benefit there is that colleges have millions of dollars of instruments/equipment to fuck around with ...

What I see as the value of a degree is that it's a piece of paper that says that youre likely able to learn and play whatever game a job entails, communicate formally and effectively, be self sufficient, understand/accomplish specified goals with deadlines, and work effectively in a team.

Can someone without a degree have those skills? Totally. Does someone with a degree have all those skills? Not specifically, but they've likely been through the ringer for ~4 years and seen a lot of shit they had to face on their own and be accountable for it.

Can someone cheat their way through and be useless, sure, but they frequently found out...or just become managers unfortunately.

Skills = Makes a better soup

Degree = Makes more green

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.

It's pretty funny reading the comments because honestly I would generally agree with the meme. But I'm coming at this from the perspective of a systems administrator and when it comes to dealing with networking and security most of the people I see coming out of college with degrees don't know a goddamn thing. Their courses are like 10 years out of date and not even remotely relevant to the real world but because they spent so much money on getting it they are very inflexible about changing how they were taught.

Meanwhile when I find somebody out on the street who just has had a passion for computers since they were like five they tend to be extremely on top of current security and networking needs and more than willing to be flexible and change how things are done when the situation calls for it.

I once had a fortune cookie that read something like this, "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want".

And let me tell you, I have a lot of experience! That cookie made me OK with learning the "hard" way.

Although this is stupid you wouldn't believe the amount of people I work with who are "highly educated" who just have the worst work process / ideas / work ethic.

The past two years of my life working in corporate has dramatically changed my overall views on average human intelligence.

You don't need a formal education to be great in your field, but it will help ypu grow immensely.

Should have a third, normal looking carrot with "having skills and a degree."

On my team of sysadmins, the best ones never had any formal education haha.The guys that are wizard tier Unix admins only have high school

Either will land you a job lol

Not the point but I still work at an amazon warehouse while getting my degree and people assuming it's just like highschool seem a bit privileged/naive to me.

The classic "education sucks and college teachers are antifa agent" trope. Please don't get educated is usually coming from right wing figures whose parents bought them a degree from a prestigious university.

They always present them as mutually exclusive, instead of related or reinforcing.

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.

It all comes down to acquiring and using knowledge and initiative. Probably gonna spend a few years on basic just to get intermediate level stuff.

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

I actually agree with this one and i'm saying that as someone who has a degree.

There are different kinds of intelligence and not all of them are necessarily going to get you a job. You could have multiple degrees and still be an idiot

I just finished my CS Bachelors and overall most of it felt like a massive fucking waste of time, especially since I suck at learning from lectures and also the content was like 15 years out of date. For the few classes that actually seemed worthwhile and interesting, I'm trying to figure out who the fuck is hiring for these skills that's not military-adjacent. I did end up earning some Masters credits through a fast track program, but I don't think it's worth continuing at this point.

Kinda shit a PhD writes who can't find a job with his or her exotic qualifications...

The college kids carrots are growers not showers?

would be nice if it worked like that.

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.