Not sure if you're speaking generally or only with regard to ATCs, but it's completely possible to make a good living doing IT work without having a college deg

Not sure if you're speaking generally or only with regard to ATCs, but it's completely possible to make a good living doing IT work without having a college degree. If you're able to make the jump to software development it can become even more lucrative. The salary progression is more linear than a Stanford grad clearing $200k annually at Google straight out of college but making six figures in your 20s without a degree as a network/cloud engineer or sysadmin is pretty doable.