It's not the key to the future, but at a minimum it's a ticket punch required for a lot of aviation jobs...especially jobs handed out by larger corporations.

Unless you know for a fact starting out that your aviation path will go down the road less travelled, you had better get the degree. If you're smart, you'll get one that will give you a fallback position. There are also many vocational trades which can serve as a fallback, but most of them will not help you get pilot jobs.

There's all kinds of talk about the cost vs. benefit of college these days, and I happen to agree that the math is questionable when you're talking six figures and years of debt for a "Fill-in-the-Blank Studies" degree...you can get a waitress job right out of HS, no need to spend all that time and money on a BA first. But corporate america is still status quo, so degrees are still something most of us need for the time being.