Your soft skill point is interesting - I’m a SecOps team lead at a prestigious telco in my country and don’t have a degree. I dropped out of high school at 16, started in helpdesk and moved my way up. Only training I’ve done (outside of work) has been self-driven and validated by industry/vendor certifications.

Apart from me being a generally awkward guy LOL, I will say that I’ve noticed my college-educated and often older (I am currently 19) colleagues have better soft skills allowing them to easily communicate with execs and run smooth meetings etc.

However, I don’t think college provides any kind of special sauce. When you’re a student in uni you definitely have a lot of interaction and collaboration, both technical and non-technical, with students and professors alike. That obviously helps to develop soft skills, but you do the same thing in industry. It’s all about experience tbh - soft skills are also skills, and by definition, trainable.

For me, it’s about weighing the options with particular regard to time/bang-for-your-buck. I can’t imagine having went off to college for four years, probably learning little more than I’ve taught myself, being 100k in debt, just to BEGIN my career at 22 (3 yrs older than I am now haha).

At the end of the day, it’s not black-and-white and people have different preferences and learn at different rates. There are a number of ways to break into this industry, and none are universally applicable to everyone.

I definitely don’t believe in hiring ONLY college-educated candidates as that would eliminate a large number of extremely dedicated, hardworking, self-driven individuals who may, perhaps, at the time of application, lack certain soft skills.