A degree is something that a person who conforms to the norms aspires to. Nothing wrong with that, I have a PhD. I got it in the middle of the dot com boom. It's a nice conversation piece but otherwise has zero relevance to what I do. Instead of getting rid in one of the bubble companies or taking a fat salary solving the y2k problem for some boring consulting company, I went off and did research.

Then I pivoted to become a software engineer, and I went back to doing research at an industrial research institute. And via a brief stint doing some more software development I ended up being a startup entrepreneur in my late thirties. That was ten years ago.

In Germany where I live it's an almost automatic salary booster, which is nice except I don't get a salary because I'm a freelance consultant and a bootstrapped startup CTO (might get a salary out of that soon). It's what I did after I got my degree that enables me to charge premium rates when I'm freelancing.

Entrepreneurial mindset and straight career paths via some big name university are two things. One requires taking risk, the other is basically about risk averse careers. Big name universities, followed by big name companies and big title career paths. Again nothing wrong with that. But not a likely path for starting your own company, which is risky.