I got a civil engineering degree at a huge state school, my degree has definitely opened a lot of doors for me, it's a great backup to flying, and as a hobby it's convenient to be able to design and build literally anything I want while having a much deeper understanding than just knowing the building codes. The college experience was fun, but honestly being a young professional with a paycheck was much more fun.

Having said that, not all degrees are created equal and colleges have become for-profit industries that prey on 18 year old kids who don't know how to financially plan, yet can get almost unlimited loans. High school academia, boomer parents, etc all tow the line that trade jobs are for losers and a college degree will pay for itself in dividends, regardless of the degree and the debt, so colleges are in a race to the top for higher and higher tuition while keeping students enrolled for as long as possible. During my freshman orientation my advisor told me most people don't make it through engineering, so I should take gen ed classes, find what I loved, and my current course load of calculus and calc-based physics was too difficult, so she changed my schedule to repeat my junior year of high school. I saw what they were trying to do and changed my classes back that night, but most kids (and parents) didn't even consider that lady was trying to sell them the financial equivalent of a luxury car for every year they spent at that school, so this was no place to "find myself." I also took classes outside of engineering to artificially boost my GPA and in most other majors they crammed 700 kids into a lecture hall, posted the powerpoints from the classes online every day, then had 2 midterms and a final that were scan-tron tests with questions verbatim from the powerpoints. You could literally skip every class except for test days, just read through the powerpoints the night before, and easily get an A. Multiply that times 4 classes, and that's all most kids had to do to get a degree in 4 years with a 3.5+ GPA. I'm gonna speculate that before the interwebs college was a lot harder; required people to show up to class, pay attention, take notes, study their notes, and their prior preparation and responsibility directly related to their success on the tests, so even if someone had a communications degree and their 'knowledge' was the same, they still had to have a certain level of responsibility, so their degree was more valuable. I also kept hearing that a college degree has a $1M return on investment, but once again, I'd love to see where that raw data came from. For an engineer, absolutely. For a lot of other degrees, I'd be skeptical. Colleges have insidiously morphed into a money pit that could financially ruin someone if they don't get a marketable degree.

A lot of people I went to college with just assumed a degree meant a higher paying white collar job. Then everyone graduated and suddenly the tangible pain of paying back 6 figures of debt at 6% interest that they couldn't declare bankruptcy on, became very real. A few months after they graduated they had to spend over $1000 a month on loans alone, which is rough when the average salary of a college graduate is around $50k ($3000/mo take home), but keep in mind that roughly half are making less than that and many aren't getting jobs at all, so they end up defaulting. But I digress...

Long story short, I think colleges are rapidly losing credibility and a degree alone is becoming a poor indicator of how employable someone may be. I think right now they're an easy discriminator for HR at the airlines, but as the pilot shortage gets worse I really doubt any airline will hesitate to remove that requirement when they need pilots asap, especially when the money and effort to get all your ratings and build 1,500 hours is probably more difficult than a lot of degree programs. At a practical level, I can't tell the difference in the cockpit between someone with or without a degree.

For the time being it's still a requirement at the majors though, and nobody has a crystal ball. If anything, like community service, it's a good tie-breaker if you're playing the game, but be weary of the pitfalls. I'd highly suggest prioritizing getting your ratings over an unrelated college degree, but this is just my humble opinion along with the logic that caused me to get here. It's open to change with new information.