I would like to make it clear that I'm not "arguing" and have no doubt David will NEED a degree in the Aviation field. It's almost not optional right now. That comes and goes.
I'm simply relating that many degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on... unless they are a requirement and lead to better things, which is also what Wayne said his was for, in the grand scheme of his career.
I'm more interested in the false economy created by massive loans and the resulting increase in prices that doesn't match the reality of the salary expected from most degree programs.
"Free money" creates a twisted Market that is disconnected from the untility of the product being sold.
And in the case of "IT" degrees, specifically, they're usually based on badly written curricula that often don't cover current practices or techniques. There's exceptions to that generality, of course... especially at top schools. Reviewing Carnegie-Mellon or MIT's online videos of their advanced coursework shows those schools are keeping up and even advancing tech, but I suspect a majority of IT schools are teaching stuff from the past. Even if the past was only last year.
As far as the comment that school brings out creativity...? Not sure I'm buying that one. Sounds like a good Marketing spin, though. Plenty of non-creative grads and non-grads and plenty of creative folk in both circumstances. They're unrelated.
And quite frankly, you need both to run an IT shop. The creative types do an awful job at hardware and software audits. It bores them to death. You really don't want a creative type in charge of keeping track of an Enterprise level patch management system, for example. You may want them to target how to speed up a particular audit process that's manual labor intensive, or something similar... But the day to day tracking and maintenance, they'll blow it and have a complete mess of disorganized crap after about six months when they start getting lazy about it because they're "too good" to be really looking at the output of their automated reports they built, and checking them for sanity.
Back to David. I don't think he knows what he wants to do yet in life, with the caveat that almost nobody his age will ever do the same job for more than seven years. A stint at a larger college provides insights into "what's going on" out there. Also provides Networking with new groups of people, and of course that strange comraderie of an Alma Matter which has garnered a number of people I've worked with over the years, jobs... Even if they weren't qualified for them.
(One company I worked for was almost exclusively run by USAFA grads. They had some huge blind spots due to their insular view of leadership and quite literally the company would have failed numerous times over if they hadn't hired a head of Engineering who came from a completely different world... Old-school AT&T. They were smart enough to lists to him and the company survived for a while.)
Nothing bad about going to a school to meet and network, but it's a damn expensive way to job shop right now.
David's situation is somewhat unique in that he has networking opportunities many do not. That's not a judgement or anything, just another fact to be weighed.
