If I had gone to college I might have ended up with a social life and probably wouldn’t have done much better/worse economically. I have this current theory th

If I had gone to college I might have ended up with a social life and probably wouldn’t have done much better/worse economically. I have this current theory that there are a lot of domain/industries even in software development are made much harder to get into for the “uneducated” because the companies tend to source less experienced employees exclusively through university hiring pipelines. Now I have no qualms absolutely tearing into the current implementation of higher education, but I’ve spent most of my life as an observer and I definitely see now some huge benefits of higher education outside a piece of paper and lectures. My biggest frustration is that non-traditional students (outside a single demographic being ex-military) are thrown to the wayside or straight up scammed by otherwise legitimate colleges. When I first started looking at going back I was dumbfounded when schools were more interested in my high school disciplinary record and not really interested in my established professional and experience. One popular state research university near me started offering online programs for “professional and non traditional students” but the only degrees offered are “useless liberal arts degrees” (think degrees that are used as the punchline in political slurring battles) or “made up” degrees that aren’t remotely related to any on-campus program, are often worse than the aforementioned liberal arts degreee and are designed for no other reason but to extract money from poor people. A lot of them also have jumped in the bootcamp hype. I can’t tell you how much spam I’ve seen from universities wanting me to join the Cybersecurity bootcamp. Again this is not your typical For-profit university, this is a respected state school with best on the nation programs in certain areas.