Higher education has become perhaps one of the largest and most well composed scams of our age, at least, in North America (I have no global perspectives into this). We are indoctrinated into the belief from the earliest stages of our lives that we must head to the best schools and become specialists in an indescribably small target of knowledge if we are to ever "make something" of ourselves: in our capitalist society, this means rich.

So our society tell us that to live the life we're supposed to live (ie, "Six figures, at the least!" means you're happy), we need to gain the means to make that kind of money. We have arrived at this universal consensus that higher education will produce your goals and therefore university education equates to life fulfillment. How did we get here? By having people from highly specialized and technical fields being able to charge higher-than-average value for their time. That's right, university enabled many really smart people to get really high-paying jobs. These people all went to university to make something of themselves. We also don't like to take risks to get where we want to be, as we have it drilled into our heads since youth that risks are bad and university is the only way to ensure you'll be happy later in life, because lots of high-paying jobs come demand university education of any type, and it's the best way to ensure you get a job (lowering your risk of not making six-figures). These two factors have lead to our inability to evaluate this realm without the consensus that university is the key to life fulfillment (a fat juicy salary). Despite my tone, there isn't anything socially wrong with this model.

So where's the scam? We're told that university is the key to the universe. Universities have long since abandoned our goals in attending them, and realized they are a business. They can create classes that aren't exactly surgery, building rockets, advanced maths-- (things that are the high-paying jobs, and be deserving of it), and still make money off of them. Why? You attribute value to a scrap of paper that has the words "Bachelor's degree" or "Masters degree" of ANY type, entirely without the slightest consideration for what was studied, what was retained, how one can preform, or anything from those 5 years. It's almost as if this is straight out of Hairy Potter: you're writing down on a magic scroll "Curriculum vitae" add the archaic words "Baccalaureus in Arte Ingeniaria" and poof you've been instantly transported to the land of SixFig to do the same repetitive task for the next 50 years of your life, which will make you very, very happy.

We have such a bias to generalize that any person with any degree is better than any person with no degree simply from the value we attribute to this magic word. What does a degree even mean now? The business of education has flooded the market with degrees to get more business. We have students applying in droves with the knowledge that they simply must get a degree to live a proper life, but they don't want to do surgery or rocket science (it's too hard, or uninteresting), so they study really interesting things like the arts, history, and philosophy (things that our society and more importantly business out to make money hardly care about; their only "9-5 SixFig low-risk" jobs are to teach what they learn, and thus go learn a skill applicable to that business).

The scam doesn't just end there. Human Resources departments across the country have so highly placed value into simply having this document that they mandate it's requirement on almost every job application they put out, especially the really repetitive and easy work in an attempt to "weed out all the bad candidates". They honestly don't even care what you studied, they just want to see it, it's great to have it on there. I have heard enough asinine flawed reasons defending why it's there to fill a room, but when it comes down to it, it's simply there because people looking to hire you have placed a lot of value into any random specialization of knowledge from any random institution. They don't even care how well you did, or what your W degree in field X at school Y from year Z taught you that is different from a W degree in field X at school A from year Q. Oh, but Brock University, Ontario is better than SD University, Rajasthan ... that's obviously a given because they're from a country I know nothing about.

A degree is treated as if it's part of an ISO standard of documents, but entirely ad-hock, vaguely defined, difficult to match knowledge gained with job requirements (pfft, a software degree, did you even learn what GIT was or how to talk to business people, or did you just write a linked list in 50 languages?)

Suddenly we are full of anecdotal evidence that degrees are useless: we have cabbies, stock boys, cashiers, janitors, librarians, wait staff, and gas attendants with magic letters at the end of their names. Damn, someone lied to us, the magic spell didn't work, and yet somehow, we're full of anecdotal evidence of people who don't get these magic letters starting massive and successful businesses all over the world, producing paradigm shifts in their field of interest. And still we have statistical proof that people with degrees make more money: HR says that it's required to make that much.

A degree is a wonderful thing when you want to try and move up in a kafkaesque bureaucracy where you're surrounded by others doing the same thing for 50 years all very, very happy that they used to know so much about some special field of interest now long and far in the past, so remote from this spreadsheet they look at every day with a fist full of highlighters trying to reach Dave's quota of spreadsheets they glared down for the month.

A degree will get you a job running behind a wall every day to push the X-Ray button so you can look for a pre-defined and well established set of what different types of damage look like. You obviously had to study the history of the machines to come to those conclusions, and know that electrons are being thrown from a spinning tungsten disk to a volt-sensitive sheet, and they need to know how electrons displace the ones in your bones, and how the chemicals work, because they'll be busy expanding that science while they look at your broken bone's image and match it against the examples. Makes sense, right? You need a degree to do a task that really is simple? I mean, that's what other people with degrees say, and they're all smart too... better shut up so I don't sound like an idiot in front of the geniuses who are so much happier than me because they make so much more money. I just don't "get" it, I never learned the special "ways to think" in university.

A degree could also lead to something really rewarding, you might study something you love, and gain a knowledge of the universe you could get about philosophers and art (but, that's not available at the library, and if it were, probably doesn't come with bragging rights). You might expand your field of study, you might become famous, you might even have studied something that is a very high-paying skill to have and be very happy on your death bed that you made that much money.

So, go on, buy a few sports cars or even a house worth of education in degrees, you're going to be working hard on expanding that field sitting behind a 9-5 job for the next 50 years wrapped in a warm lie that it was necessary to do your job that could get outmoded very quickly if we dropped the act. Just be sure you don't disappoint your parents that worked their asses off to pay for you to have the chances they [never] had, do what they did[n't do]: get a degree. Just don't lose sight of what's important.

tl;dr: Dogma.