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Originally Posted by theclassic
College degrees are overrated, and imprison people into professions they may not like, and people stay in those professions just because they believe that's all they’re qualified to do. Why? Because that's what their degree that they spent an enormous amount of money on reflects to them and to human resource departments.
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Wow - I disagree in a big way. I agree that having a college degree doesn't necessarily mean someone that has it is smarter than someone that doesn't, and there are certainly examples where academically questionable people have college degrees due to slipshod oversight by their schools, but generally speaking a college degree shows that a particular job candidate not only has some level of intelligence and a certain aptitude in their area of focus, but as or more importantly, they have demonstrated the drive to apply that knowledge toward a goal. Any company and HR director worth a damn feels the same way.
There are differences obviously between undergraduate degrees and graduate degrees and their impact on your job prospects. Obviously, as you pursue a particular line of study in beyond a bachelor's degree, you gain an ever-increasing level of expertise in that subject and will be more attractive to employers in that particular field, but it's usually not all that limiting.
In my experience, what degrees you have on your resume matter the most when you're first starting out in a particular type of career. As you build up work experience, that becomes the dominant factor in your desirability as an employee, with your degree(s) becoming increasingly unimportant, with the exception of those that pursue additional degrees directly related to their field of work (people going for their MBA's being a common example).
At Microsoft, I came across a large number of people that had undergrad and even graduate degrees that had little or nothing to do with what their positions at the company; they were smart, ambitious people who did a good job of convincing HR that their school experience had broader applications than just in their field of study, and the HR people were smart enough to recognize that.
The extent to which someone may feel "trapped" in a profession because that's what their degree(s) say they should do is really dependent on those people's willingness to let themselves feel that way.