A degree just opens more options. It doesn't guarantee you'll take advantage of those options. That's all. Stupid people get degrees all the time and can't/won't exercise those options, so it gives the idea of a degree a bad name. Basically, if you're already smart (and no matter what you think, 50% of you aren't), then a degree can give you more chances to go further. If you're not so smart a degree isn't going to do much for you.
The reason degrees got a reputation for advancing careers is because it used to be that people with higher IQs generally went to college and got degrees in things like physics, chemistry, medicine, biology, engineering, law, etc. Those people made good money, so people thought degree = money.
People always engage in post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacious reasoning because they cannot separate correlation from causation. They though if they could just get degrees to niggers and spics they'd all be engineers and make good money. What they proved was that it wasn't the degrees that were making whites successful. It was the IQ that was making them successful and the degrees just gave them the training necessary for their field of work.
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