Quote:
Originally Posted by Dottore
Yeah right. Try this in law or medicine or engineering for example and see how far you get.
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True to a point, but that's largely due to protection mechanisms that have been put in place over the years by strong professional societies (incidentally one of my beefs about the AIA with respect to architects - they fail miserably to protect the profession against being undermined by those without the requisite training in the same way law and medicine have done...)
Anyway, you still can become a paralegal (and make pretty good money) without a law degree, and you can still work in health care (and make pretty good money) without a medical degree. My father-in-law just retired from Verizon as an executive V.P. worth megabucks a couple of years ago. He had an associate's degree from years back in engineering studies (not a PE). Eventually he went on to earn a B.S. and an MBA, but this was after he'd made executive-level. The point is that the degree TENDS to open doors, but it is absolutely not a requirement for someone to do what they want to do except in very specific situations (e.g. jobs that might require an M.D., a J.D., or a PE).
There are an awful lot of slackers and do-nothings out there today WITH degrees that are content to be nothing more than cogs in various corporate machinery. Hardly worth the cost of admission to do something like that. For the small percentage that is going to overachieve anyway and kick butt and be entrepreneurial, the degree is incidental anyway. For people like that, it's typically not needed - they can work around it and still be very successful.
Most of the modern educational system is driven by money, for the sake of making more money - not because it's any indication of great aptitude or skill as it was maybe 40+ years ago. Nowadays it's just getting one's ticket punched for the vast majority and ensures in most cases (and in normal economic times) that you don't have to work at Jiffy Lube. That's about it.