This was asked in response to someone saying lots of degrees would be better off just being certificates. Not me, but I'm happy to answer since apparently Much Of College Is A Scam is the topic of the day! Keeping in mind that in most fields there is a divide between the low-regular level jobs, and the jobs that require some sort of specific deep dive or academic expertise, I'm assuming lots of careers where four year degrees are the norm now could be cut down to some kind of basic cert. (hell, take out the pointless GenEd credits designed to suck student's loan accounts dry and everybody could graduate in 2 or 3 years instead of 4, then get "well rounded" on their own time for cheap/free) Just from personal experience? I got an accounting degree. Accounting for non-CPA jobs could be a 1 year program if you cut out all the pointless gen eds and specific stuff they'll never do, and honestly even those of us who do go into auditing will learn more in 6 months on the job than we did in 4 years of school. In fact, most of high level accounting is industry specific, and you gravitate toward one of those then learn on the job. My final accounting job was Military Contract accounting, which is an odd niche with weird rules that doesn't get talked about in school at all. My accounting degree required me to take pointless shit like computer programming (in Future Basic, which was already dead in the late 90s, but they needed to give that otherwise useless professor something to do!) Calculus (WHY? I passed, forgot literally everything the day after the final, and haven't thought about it once since), and a shit ton of GenEds for stuff like Earth Science (grad student rambling about global warming with some PBS For Kids level science tossed in) and a bunch of "elective" credits I had to spend money on to learn about interesting subjects in the slowest, dumbest, most inefficient, and cost ineffective manner humanly possible. Computer Science. My daughter got tired of paying for Covid college, dropped out, went to tech school for 1/5 the price and 1/2 the time and now does the same job as her peers who got degrees. The only thing tempting her to go back and finish her degree is for arbitrary promotion/job requirements, not any actual skill or knowledge. My other kids, Geology, fine, and Mechanical Engineering, fine. But both of them still have to waste their time on a bunch of pointless bullshit classes just like I did almost 30 year ago only instead of Global Warming, now it's Gay Communism. Creative Writing degrees are utterly useless for becoming an actual working professional writer. I wouldn't even have a cert for this one. I've seen more people where their MFA was an active detriment to being successful as a writer than where it helped. And the overwhelming majority of working professional novelists did something else to make a living, while we learned to write on the side until we got good enough to get paid for it. From successful professionals I know well about their fields? Music, Art. There's a big difference between teaching it and making it for a living creating it. Marketing (that one is particularly funny since the educational part has got dick to do with doing the actual job, only all the corporate marketing jobs demand degrees). Foreign language degrees, outside of an academic/historic/expert level niche use. That could easily be a cert. Go to Utah. Every returned missionary kid picks up a free minor in the language of whatever country they lived in for two years. And they don't actually go to class, they just test out of all of them (but still have to pay for the credits). For the rest of us, just get DuoLingo. When I was interviewing and hiring people, having a degree told me one thing. This matches what I've been told by a great many others in the same position, including my father in law who hired hundreds of people over decades for a giant mega corporation- and that is a college degree only means this person was able to stick with a multi year project until it was done. That's it. Even basic knowledge of the degree subject was not assumed. And past entry level, it got super common to be hiring people with degrees that had absolutely nothing to do with the job they were currently doing. Because everybody knows that on the job experience is far more important than school, and the only people who won't admit that are academics. That's just from my narrow view of the multitude of degrees that are out there. I'm pretty sure the rest of you have got opinions on your degrees and your career fields too.