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.”

Well not in tech, no.

You don’t need a degree to work in tech. You need a degree to work in mechanical engineering, biotech, etc.

IT is not a good use of college IMO

The problem is really that people think you need to pay $350,000, but you shouldn’t seriously pay more than $40,000. Higher education as a concept isn’t a scam, but certain schools like the Ivy Leagues and private universities absolutely are. While there certainly are benefits to going to a prestigious school, most public state universities in the United States are excellent and hold good reputation. The quality of education you’ll get at a local state college will only be like 10% worse than Harvard or Yale, but will cost 10x less. There’s also the argument for technical schools or apprenticeships; while potentially more limiting, these also offer a significantly more affordable path of higher education for Americans.

While you won’t necessarily get a bonus or anything for having a degree that aligns with the role you perform at a company, you aren’t getting that job without the degree. College degrees serve as a way to move between the American de jure caste system; you can either work in low-wage jobs that won’t require a degree, or you pursue higher education to get access to the ones that do.

It’s more of a minimum requirement for many jobs. It sucks, but I think you’re viewing it wrong. It’s not going to get you anything except maybe keep your resume out of the trash.

Meanwhile I’ve been a professional software engineer for 9 years now with no college degree.

In tech, it pretty much is a scam, or at best a classist gatekeeping requirement that anybody interested in getting real work done will ignore or handwave away. At least till you get up to the level of having “publish x number of papers per year” as part of the job requirements.

First off, videos on tiktok aren’t really worth taking seriously. There’s just too much fake garbage on there.

But anyway, the cost of education is absolutely a huge problem. It should be free or very low cost.

That being said, it’s simply demonstrably false to claim that a degree is useless or doesn’t help you get a job. There are many fields where a degree is an absolutely a requirement, like medicine, law, engineering, etc. The specific degree does matter a lot, though, and there are other important job hunting skills that you need to develop in order to actually get a job.

Speaking from personal experience, every job I’ve had thus far (as a software engineer) has listed a 4 year degree as either a hard requirement or strongly preferred. I do not believe recruiters would have given me the time of day were it not for my degree, because they are looking to match as many requirements as possible and are filtering people out. And when applying for jobs, ATS programs routinely filter out job applications with resumes that don’t list a degree.

Job seeking is an extremely gameified system and you have to learn the game in order to beat it. It sucks big time and I loathe doing it, but it’s what you have to do if you want to get high-paying jobs. That, or know someone at a company that can get you a job.

My son pays 1800€ per year for his IT education, and we as parents would have paid for it if nessecary but it is covered by our government through ‘study finance’. Also covered is his health insurance and public transport. He lives at home, so without the cost for rent and living he will get through without debt, maybe even some savings when he earns his degree, which is required for him to get a job at the American company my wife works.

This company won’t compensate your degree, (I don’t know of any that do anymore after the dot-com bubble), but they will give you courses and further training to give you career options with higher pay.

To address your criticism of your degree, it appears that tech, in general, has been undergoing a massive contraction that appears to be structural instead of cyclical.

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.

Question from a milleniold abroad: How do you set yourself up for an upper middle class+ job in the US today?

Where I live, the trades are a good alternative if you want to make money earlier in life, but there’s a pretty hard upper limit.
With a university education, you earn nothing for a lot longer, then it takes you at least 10-15 years to catch up, and many never do, but if you want the potential to break out of lower middle class, don’t come from generational wealth, and don’t strike it lucky with founding your own company, there’s no other way.

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.

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