I just made a comment on another sub that I thought would go well here. OP there lamented Florida removing teaching degree requirement and saying “other technical jobs wouldn't let you do them without degree”. My response:
Unfortunately you're partly right. It used to be allowed for other professions that now require a degree. When my father left the military he used the skills he learned there to get a technical engineering job. He taught me a bunch of electrical, structural, computer engineering stuff and let me help him with his work. He wasn't supposed to let me, but work didn't know.
After he taught me stuff, even I could understand what he'd be complaining about, like when he'd be going over a new schematic and crossing things out, writing corrections on them, and bringing them back to work the next day so the architect could fix his mistakes and issue an updated copy for us to work from.
Yet despite him knowing enough to not blindly follow the architect's orders, and even me understanding some of those mistakes would cost the company tons of money, it's not the architect who gets a major life upheaval… no, the company decided all engineers must have college degrees no exceptions even though that was pointless.
He struggled to work full time, do college full time, and raise kids at the same time so he had to leave work. It's not like he could leave college instead because of works ridiculous demands. So basically he lost his job, I lost my hands on STEM work experience, and we became even more dirt poor than we already were (I didn't realize at the time that we ate rice and pasta all the time out of necessity, or that the reason we let people give us clothes and shoes and stuff and never shopped for it ourselves was because we couldn't afford shoes or shirts even from thrift stores, at least I didn't realize until we lost our home, lived in a cramped space with someone else, and I tilled and planted vegetables outside by hand as a teen so we could have more to eat, and I would sneak onto farmers fields and eat their vegetables raw or would eat wild plants raw).
I had to deal with poverty because my father was forced to get a college degree when he didn't need one.
I got a college degree even though I didn't need one. When my employer couldn't find enough engineers to hire and asked us to refer people, they refused the referral I gave even though I personally vouched that he was better than our recent hires, and that I knew from working with him personally. Their only reason was lack of degree. I tried insisting he knows more and is better than our guys coming out of college but they don't care. Personal vouching from someone who knows should mean more than the degree.
These degree requirements do little more than keep the lower class crushed under the boots of the upper class.
That was the end of my comment.
Screw the snot nose formal bullies and their useless rules for keeping poor people punched down.
Degrees can help with sorting applications, but making degree a requirement is one of the worst choices of the last century. I refuse to bow to our rich and elite self proclaimed overlords.
I would rather go back to back breaking work planting tomatoes and potatoes by hand than give in to their degrading bullshit.