Ask Lemmy

While it's hugely lagging, the US higher educational community is slowly accepting that for most people a bachelors degree is nothing more than a quasi-mandatory general purpose professional credential. Many community colleges now offer a couple of 4-year degrees, and many more reputable schools are opening extension campuses and offering remote degrees or hybrid programs that skew strongly towards remote learning.

For 90% of students, there is no specific, identifiable benefit to a traditional college experience, and dear god (most) people need to stop going into mountains of debt for little private schools or out of state publics. I didn't take on any significant debt until law school, and while I noped out of that career path because it's awful if you don't have a passion for either your clients or defeating your opponents, it still paid for itself versus my original plan at 22 to teach high school English. If I'd had 6 figures of undergraduate debt, though, I would have been miserably trying to make lawyerin' work out for me financially.

I will say, contrary to what I see online a lot, that a degree actually is a nice credential to put on a resume, though it's often TERRIBLE value for the money outside the social expectation. It shows that you had the motivation and/or support structure (which is its own inequity vector) to stick with a 4+ year project and pull it off. It should have introduced you to outside people and ideas that could show you'll be more adaptable in the work environment. You will have had to make it through subjects that may not have interested you and provide "deliverables" to a "manager" at an acceptable quality level. You will have been asked to do formal communication, both written and oral. Then, finally, to one degree or another, and whether explicitly or not, you will have received training in critical thinking and justifying arguments with evidence. Even the biggest blowoff freshman comp class will force you through the exercise of writing a thesis and finding quotes from the book to back them up, and even "Rocks for Jocks" has the scientific method as an underpinning for the labs and the information taught.

Given how many people have degrees, it's an easy and not unreasonable filter for HR and hiring managers, though as with anything institutional, it ends up used well beyond its value. If you aren't getting a very good deal to go to a place with a name that will do networking for you, though, there's no practical sense in paying extra for anything beyond two years of CC gen-ed and two more at the nearest public university. If Bumblefuck & Dickwash Wesleyan Presbyterian College (est. 1833 and a half) is the only place you're going to actually manage a degree, then I guess it's worth the debt, but that population seems... small.