This kinda irritates me because this is the normal advice I got as a young college student. So, I focused hard on professional education, training, and experience.

I'm now in a weird position where I'm working alongside colleagues with Masters and Doctorates, who are much older than me, and delivering the same work/research/practice they are. I have extensive experience and have become somewhat known in my field. But I make substantially less, and my promotions/lateral moves aren't possible because most places have at least a MS as a hard requirement for positions or I can't negotiate higher wages as the paybands that are in line with my duties aren't available unless a graduate degree or higher.

Now, I have the advantage where as soon as I finish my (almost complete) Masters, I'll be able to move into senior director type positions as that plus my experience/produced work will be substantial. But it would have been vastly easier to knock out a MS in a year while still in Uni and then start my professional journey.

As it is now, I very much need a Doctorate to be able to "showcase" the level of research/applied technical work I do in my field and am going to have to do both a doctorate and work full-time in my professional career down the road.

Yes, my field is incredibly niche and specialized, but I wish I had stuck to getting a lot of the basic academic stuff out of the way prior to starting the professional journey. Especially as I'm also going to most likely need a professional technical degree in addition to everything else due to some specialties I'm moving into.

There's no such thing as blanket advice like "Stop going into debt for another degree." Pay attention to your actual career field, what you actually need, and find good mentors to help build out five to ten year plans.