no employer has ever given me any amount of money for that degree

I don’t see how you can know this. If it helped you, it was as a baseline qualification that helped you get hired at all. Were you expecting some kind of moment where an HR person said, on your first day, “oh hang on a moment, you have a degree - we’ll need to raise your salary for that - terribly sorry for the oversight.”

There is a trend on social media to dismiss college as wasteful and expensive. Article after article after data show college is worth it (for some) if planned right.

No, I don’t really want to entertain any suggestion that there is any conspiracy to drive people to college unnecessarily, however there is a LOT of marketing to get people to go. I have NEVER heard of an employer paying a random, off the street hire, for a degree. I have no idea where that came from. Some employers will pay you, or pay for, advancing your education while employed, but that’s rare.

Unfortunately, people don’t do the math that going to get a $150k degree for a job that starts at $39k/yr that doesn’t have a lot of career progression or very limited high-paying positions might not be a good idea.

Nobody cares which college you went to or how exclusive it was, unless you’re getting a job in a field that compares dicks over what school you went to like high finance, or maybe something like a lawyer or physician could open doors at more exclusive institutions. For the rest of us, finding the least expensive college that will offer a decent education should be the mark. After your first industry job, that’s all anyone cares about. Work experience. Same for going to a trade school - which is a perfectly valid choice if the field you’re interested would be better served by going to one.

Don’t just go to college because that’s magically supposed to make things better. It doesn’t. It needs to be a well planned decision with real possibility of career progression at a pace you can realistically hope to make decent money in to pay back any loans and have an improving lifestyle.

I’ll offer that my experience was going to college handily landed me my first two jobs in my industry, however it took over 20 years of working in my industry before I started making enough money to have anything remotely called a “lifestyle”. Unless you’re well-connected and well heeled headed into an industry with crazy starting pay, you’re not gonna just buy all the toys on day one. Most of us are going to take many years before getting comfortable or even treading water.

There are certain degree paths where it will net you a specific career path. The healthcare field is very particular about the specific degree/certification/licensure you have. In that regard, schooling makes sense for those.

DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?

You are talking about the outcome being pointless, but I’d go further and say that the process of completing college is bullshit as well.

Forced to live in shoebox dorm room for the first year or more in many colleges, being given lectures that are quite simply shit the majority of the time - to the point that it was the norm to just stop attending lectures and basically just self-teach yourself the textbook - and often taking tests that fail to actually meaningfully test your comprehension of the subject. Then you leave, and quite often you completely forget a large portion of what you studied as you enter the job market and never have to apply that knowledge again.

University in my country for CS cost me boutish US$250 per six months, and this included a nearly state wide ticket for public transport and heavily subsidized good at the student cafeteria.

I learnt lots at university, and that has been useful at work, but the degree itself doesn’t seem to matter much. But I’m in tech, and Europe, and university was publicly funded

American universities keep raising the prices and people keep paying. There’s no reason for it to cost that much, beyond profits

Maybe you suck at your job and don’t realize it.