I do not have a degree, but have competed against people with degrees for most of my career as a business systems analyst along with consulting and manufacturing management. I’m now in a great situation with good pay and near total flexibility to work remote or in-person as I see fit. I work at a small business so a massive raise is unlikely until some retirements happen, but I’m on a good retirement track even without a massive raise.
Not having the degree was a big handicap for me to make the jump from hourly to salary at a very large multi-national in my mid 20’s, but once I got a good five years of solid performance, results and experience I was on fairly good footing. Finding increasingly well-paying work with increasingly good perks has not been an issue for me since.
In my experience you can’t go too wrong with any degree that has obvious economic applications, even if you don’t make a career out of specifically applying what you study. Engineering has come up quite a bit and I’ve known a lot of people in a lot of different positions with engineering educations and backgrounds.
Some products are so complicated that they can only be sold by people with the engineering know-how to be effective salesmen. Even some buyers in certain industries need to have or can greatly benefit from the technical knowledge gained with an engineering education. Many great project managers and general managers have engineering backgrounds as well, learning the business side of things on-the-job or by further study.
The same idea can apply to many other fields of hard study. I know a few lawyers who don’t practice law but instead have leadership roles in heavy industry.
Liberal arts degrees are rarely a disadvantage, but the value becomes less clear in a lot of cases, especially as the subjects become more fringe. As others have said, earning the degree is a credential in and of itself. Whether it is a good use of money or not is another question that depends on a few things, like how rich you already are. Trust fund babies can do all of the academic navel gazing they want without risking their future well-being. Get your women’s studies degree and start a blog if you want. Most people can’t carve out a living that way.
In general terms, the utility of a degree in a field of study whose only real end-products are ideas is a lot less useful than something with obvious economic applications. Why go into deep debt to get an English degree if you’re just going to end up working in manufacturing management? Sure, your emails may be nice and crisp, but we’ve got stuff to build, ship and sell here.
I’ve also worked with a production planner who had a degree in physics, a software tester with a biology degree and another software tester with a four year culinary degree. One of the third party developers I’ve worked with has a degree in History, learning to code after he graduated. You know, so his family could eat. Maybe they’re happy with whatever they spent on their degree, but I sure wouldn’t be if I had to go into deep debt only to make similar or less than the guy who dropped out.
I agree that this is a major, major handicap. A massive red flag for years to come, even if OP does everything right from here on out.
