I was a philosophy major, and dropped out after 2.5 years. My career had been evolving throughout that entire time, and at some point I had to make a choice.

I was a philosophy major, and dropped out after 2.5 years. My career had been evolving throughout that entire time, and at some point I had to make a choice. After my second job, of six or so, nobody was even remotely interested in my education background, to the point where I deleted the entire section out of my resume with no material consequences whatsoever. In this profession (excluding academia and high R&D, or specialisations requiring scientific background, or management layers that are still highly credential-driven) , it's all about what you can do. It's amazingly democratic. A degree is only used to differentiate a candidate from a random person off the street, and only in the absence of any other information about them, any meaningful experience, etc. The moment any of that comes into play, the degree becomes vanishingly insignificant. The caveat, of course, is that if your career path takes you in that direction of doing something more than slinging code or running a small company, which gets increasingly likely as you get older, conservatise, want to get married, the works, you will be faced with severe barriers to entry in many places that are highly credential-dependent, if only through sheer institutional inertia, the force of custom, habit, and tradition, etc. While I do find it likely that these barriers are likely to become less durable in the future, in keeping with the general existential crisis of the received universal higher education narrative and the tendency toward greater meritocratic transparency in many professions (assisted by technology-fostered structural changes), there are certain things you will almost certainly never be able to do without the piece of paper, whether or not you'll ever need to use what you learned to get it.