1. Trying to be an engineer with no degree is a tough road.

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2. There are so many sides this this issue, and it seems that almost everyone can only speak from their own experience, which is course is rarely of a very wide perspective. I have worked with so many people who said they have such-and-such a background, and claim to have been successful at doing something or some job, but they then assume that this makes them as qualified as somebody else with a different background. It might or might not, but most likely the person making the claim is not able to really evaluate their relative competence.

   Myself, I got the equivalent of a bachelor's degree level in a technical trade school in Germany, then started over again and got an actual 'bach' from a college in the States (both in electrical engineering). I took many years to do the latter, because I started working full time after getting the first credential, and the side benefit was that I already knew enough from the first one to immediately get a good technical job, but that made it easier to do it the second time and I learned better on the second pass because I could see how each thing I was (re) learning applied to real practice and real-world situations. I also, in my 'spare time', did almost all of the curriculum for degrees in music and computer science, and also attended trade school to learn about fluid power (hydraulics & pneumatics), and 'audited' many courses at another college in structural engineering (because it interested me). Learning was fun!

   I don't think my second pass through learning electrical engineering really taught me a lot more about the subject that I had from the first pass, but what I DID learn, through doing it the "college way" meant that I also had to study technical writing, proper drafting, economics, more advanced math, and other things. I may or may not have ultimately absorbed more electrical engineering knowledge that somebody who took a different path (perhaps military tech school, or a vocational college), but throughout my career I found that I was stronger in many other aspects than lots of other I met and worked with, and would not have had that advantage if I had bypassed the college route. So many other smart, technically capable people I worked with were very deficient in the peripheral disciplines; maybe they could design something but could not write about it to save their lives. Maybe they were terrible at reading technical documents or drawing, or maybe they had poor drafting skills. Maybe they had no idea how the economy works and made dumb decisions based on their ignorance. I am not trying to toot my own horn here, because I ALSO worked with so many others who could blow me out of the water in just about every way, and almost all of them had significant formal education. As Vincent Vega said, "its the little differences"……. that sometimes end up being very important to the outcome of a career or technical business, and THOSE are usually obtainable primarily by the college route.

   That said, there are also a TON of folks who either have mom and dad pay for their 4 years, only to study something useless and ultimately unprofitable for them, or they go far into debt to get a degree in something that they really don't want to do, or have no talent or native aptitude for in spite of getting the 'piece of paper'.

   And I fully agree that, at least in the USA, far too many colleges and universities have a huge overhead that they pass onto the students, for no real advantage in their education. I think this is true for those planning to stop with a bachelor's, but the university route is probably still beneficial/unavoidable for those wishing to go for an advanced degree (masters, doctorate). I would like to see a much greater number of affordable colleges that resemble the 2-year community college model that still are able to provide education up to the bachelor's level. People can work at lesser jobs and work their way to a good degrees over a greater number of years, or at least stay at home while they attend college.

   And definitely, college is not for everyone in terms of their career, but I think society would be much better off if almost everyone at least bothered to try improving themselves gradually by continuing education, even if their is no degree in their future. It makes people better citizens, better thinkers, and more interesting to be around.

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3. It's really the Nation's loss that brilliant people are excluded from skilled roles on the basis of whether or not their parents were wealthy enough to send them through college.
   Way to shoot yourself in the foot so called developed countries.

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4. People, and definitely Americans, like questions reduced to a simple numeric answer and recorded as a credential. Like "4.0 GPA EE major from State U." Scrolling through a list of "skills" is work. You could assign a numeric value to the skills, and then bundle them together into a group and average those measurements and call it a…university degree.

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5. The company I still work for some fifteen years on didn't require a college degree, but it happened the degree I had was generally compatible with the work I'd be doing. So, in that sense, I got lucky… but no argument here about the debt machine. I was part of the vicious cycle where I'm told my whole formative life to "go to college," then I actually go, and it's "what'd you do that for?!" This is especially true when the tuition bills came due, which I'm still paying for fifteen years later. Ridiculous. I too would like to see that change, but barring some changing of the guard at the top of governance, I just don't see that happening.

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6. Agreed, keep up the good work 🙂

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7. One thing that causes extremely high college prices is the rip off books. They will charge an absolute fortune for the books and make sure that they can't be reused (they'll make a tiny change so this year's books are no good next year). It is a racket. The publishers are in cahoots with the schools.

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8. I basically agree with what you are saying. In addition, the quality of college educated students these days is appalling even those students graduating from top schools. There is one caveat here however, high school graduates over the last 20 years are close to being functionally illiterate. Most cannot even do simple algebra or read and comprehend anything more complex than a recipe. I have been responsible for evaluating programmers and technical staff in the software industry for the last 30 years and I have to say that I usually hired college graduates if only because high school graduates were so bad. It is a real dilemma that we have created for ourselves and I fear it will be one of the major factors in the downfall of this country.

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9. My College experience: $350 a book; read 5 chapters, act like your an authority. Priceless.

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10. When I went to college in the 80s, I wasn't chasing knowledge. I was chasing a piece of paper.

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11. I have a college degree in mechanical engineering but I have seen many engineers in my career that were not capable of performing the math required to design parts. I have also seen machinists and fabricators that were more capable of designing a part by intuition and experience far better than most engineers. Based on this, I believe there should be a route for people to prove they have the skillset to do a certain job without obtaining a degree. The exception to this would be any job that would put the public at risk and would not allow significant lifecycle testing of a product or structure (such as a building or bridge). In those situations I believe it is still necessary to have a PE with a deeper understanding and a license from the state in which they are working.

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12. In Switzerland it is possible to enroll for a Bachelor's degree without a high school one if you're 25 and older. So grateful for that.

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13. Fran? I love your channel. I know your life a little. Yeah, it's unfair to you and millions of others. Thing is, every single day I deal with people who run off to Google something, and they think it makes them expert. Yeah, it's unfair, but when society starts despising it's intellectuals, they country's failure is not far behind.

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