People who serve in the military do it because they want to, not to prepare for a job. I haven’t met too many people who regret their time in the service. Most are more proud of their military career than their airline career.

 

Great point about correlation v causation from the ‘box checker’ Master’s for O’s.

I’m going back & forth on whether to use the GI Bill for flight training or a Master’s. Sounds like a no-brainer to use it for flight training, until the VA’s restrictions on training tempo (ie, 1 flight training “course” per year, dwindling number of stand-alone flight schools who take the GI Bill, etc) are considered, along with the fact that the VA requires training 141 (pilot mills) and seems like better quality training could be available in the right 61 (career CFI instead of time builders).

Lots of variables in play, but - if a Master’s degree will help appreciably in getting on with a legacy/major (along with plenty of time built at regional with no training/other issues, networking, etc) - then I’m tempted to use the GI Bill to knock out a Master’s (perhaps even aviation-related) concurrent with flight training 61. I’m still trying to figure out how much a Master’s degree will mean to a legacy/major, though, especially by the time I’d have competitive hours.

 

ATP-CFI-CFII-MEI-AGI
4 Type ratings, 4 initial courses.
Does that not show the above?

 

All these people have been brainwashed into thinking college actually shows anything. I spent my late teens and early 20’s working hard at a job instead of getting blackout drunk on weekends at some kegger on campus. Now let me ask you, who has the more proven track record of work reliability? But I will say this the only reason that a college degree is “required” is because we let them convince us to all go get one. If we stopped telling young pilots to go get a stupid degree all this would end. A degree is required because we made it that way by way to many of us being willing to shell out even more money for something that is completely useless. It’s a scam.

 

Some of us disagree.

A pilot without a degree can fit in just fine to the existing system.

But I'd be concerned if all pilots stopped getting degrees... that would be a big cultural shift. If you look at 1000 guys with degrees and 1000 without there is going to be some delta in culture and values. Especially today since anyone who actually wants a degree can get one easily.

But I think this discussion is academic at best. The degree is the gold standard and will remain so. The pilot shortage might reduce the degree to "preferred" but that just means it will be de facto required again once the shortage is over.

Bottom line, the system wants you to be educated. You can check the box at an online diploma mill, or actually take advantage of the opportunity to learn something... you get to pick your major and electives. Or you can pee into the wind.

 

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.

 

The fact that the majority of pilots have a degree is a factor as to why the regionals currently pay a wage above the poverty line.

During the last 10 years enough pilots walked away from the industry to create a shortage. They were able to do this because they were college educated. Why slum it in the regionals for 20K a year when instead they could use their business/engineering or whatever other degree to get started on a different career track?

I see some of those individuals post in the “career advice” forum asking about switching careers. They still love flying but now make over 6 figures doing something else. They still can’t justify flying from a financial standpoint, but also feel they have a bucket list item to check and ask for advice weighing the pros and cons.

If pilots stop giving themselves an out for when things get bad, the repercussions will be felt throughout the industry. The regionals will go back to paying less than 30K a year if they can recruit a full staff of uneducated pilots who don’t possess the ability to earn much more anywhere else and are therefore stuck.

 

I have never used my degree accept for checking a box saying that I have one. I don’t even know where it is anymore. I also firmly believe that society places too much emphasis on a degree. For things like engineering, medicine, or science, I think it is very important. For flying and other fields, a trade school education would be better. Having said that, I really didn’t care why they wanted what they did, I just made sure that I had it. Those in HR and interviews look at the degree as a big deal. When they say that a degree is highly preferred (read practically required) and an applicant says that they’re not going to do that, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth. Right now they just slide your application to the side and call someone who went out and did what they wanted. In the future there may be enough of a shortage where a degree isn’t required, but for right now there are people lined up with type ratings and degrees. Call it a scam if you want, but if you went out and got a degree you’d be marketable. You may say that it is useless, but without one don’t expect a call. All of the pay and seniority given up waiting for things to change would pay for a PHD many times over. It may not make you a better pilot, but it’s hard to call it useless when you can’t get an interview without one.

 

I dropped out of community college when I was 20. At the time I couldn’t afford the expenses without going into debt, I wasn’t doing well because I was too tired from working, and a degree wasn’t actually getting me any closer to flying for a living. I had around 60 credits IIRC.

Over a decade later I am now applying to an online program. I have some GI Bill left to help me, and I’m excited to get back to learning outside of aviation. I don’t think it’s worthless, although I don’t think it’s worth carrying a lot of debt for either. Anyways, I hope to check back in a few years and change my vote.

 

This college scam has been going on for decades now. When I was in high school they told you that if you did not go and do it you would basically be a complete failure. There are some fields of work where it is required. The airlines will always require abstract things to be hired. When you have half of the country making less than 27,000 dollars a year and someone is putting 300,000 to 400,000 dollars on the table at the end of the day, you're going to have to do what they want.