Well in natural science it's more common than ever for a degree to have become a requirement over the decades for challenging positions where far more progress

Well in natural science it's more common than ever for a degree to have become a requirement over the decades for challenging positions where far more progress could be made by those having a lifetime of interest & study before they were old enough for higher education instead. There's only so many positions like that though, but these are key and have been failing to be adequately filled for decades now. It's been downhill ever since they started calling Personnel departments "Human Resources". Nomenclature which arose after all the layoffs from the Nixon recession, in response to employees actually being treated more expendable than ever, whilst relying only on paperwork filed with HR to judge those worthy of retaining their careers. Through time, regardless of what a performer can do, without an impressive file (by comparison to some known slackers already in the corp) they won't even be given a chance. These outstanding performers are getting harder to find since so many more people have a degree these days, even PhD's, and with all the average-to-below-average students now earning degrees and thus diluting the degreed talent pool. Plus more often than not the original need for enhanced credentials was purely bureaucratic, which can work OK to an extent in a well-run bureaucracy, but when you've got a key position where an average performer just will not do, it really doesn't help no matter how many degrees they have. Often you need someone who has put 4 years or less of effort into rapidly earning credentials better-than-average (at the expense of getting deep into the actual science), who will take that type of success into the workplace, having an advantage doing more of the same politically within the org. Other times, especially in science, you need someone who has had a lifetime of interest, to build upon that much more technical background, which could not be achieved in merely 4 years anyway, even by the same person. When you need a lifetime of progress you're going to get a lot more from a 21-year-old who didn't just start a few years earlier.