I spent three years getting an undergraduate degree, and then a further year getting a Masters. I can now slap the letters "BA, MSc" after my name whenever I want to.
Was it worth it?
I'm not convinced that it was. Now, admittedly, part of the problem here is that my undergraduate degree was a combined honours in Criminology and Law. It's not enough of a law degree to allow me to train as a lawyer (I would need to do either a conversion or a top-up course for that) but that's fine, because I never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place. I wanted to join the police as a criminologist and work in back offices, crunching numbers and identifying trends and all that stuff. When the global recession struck, the UK cut down on all of those jobs, declaring them to be largely unnecessary, meaning that all I could do with my degree was either join the police force as an officer, or become a prison warden. That was it. Anything else where a Criminology degree might be useful (i.e. social care) was full of people with social work/sociology degrees, and they were more attractive candidates because their knowledge was more relevant.
My Masters was in Risk Management. It was meant to be a hands-on, practical degree covering areas of health and safety, environment management, financial risk and law/crime, so that I could move into a more general business stream by doing a wider degree than my narrow BA.
I don't work in any sphere related to my degrees. As of yet, I have never done anything at work that even touches on anything I learned during my higher education. The job I have now, I got by working hard in my previous job and building up three years of experience in the field. I got that job by being one of the few people willing to take a job that pays minimum wage, despite being a lot better educated. Things are going well now, as my current job actually pays the kind of money that someone with a Masters should be earning, but I got here by having work experience, not a degree. Sure, when I go for an interview, employers are always impressed/intrigued by my education and there are some jobs where just having a university degree gets you through the door, whether it's actually relevant or not, but I reckon I could have gotten to this point without either degree.
I get told that my degrees will help me later in life, as if people reach forty and find that the only way to move up to a manager's job is to have a degree. I'm not holding my breath on that one. Why? I work in procurement, so I'll need to switch to risk management or something criminological for either of my degrees to be relevant (I'm hardly going to get promoted to Procurement Manager on the back of a BA in Criminology) and, even if it was a job where one of my degrees was relevant, it's going to be about twenty years out of date. What good is a Risk Management degree that's twenty years old? It's not. Which is why I'm looking to start doing some procurement certificates next year, so that I'll have qualifications that are relevant to my job. When I hit forty, I don't expect anyone will care what my Masters was if I've got twenty years of purchasing experience and a high-level procurement certificate.
It's not so dissimilar to my dad's story, either. He studied German at university and wound up getting a job as a freight forwarder for a pharmaceutical company that bought a lot of its products from Germany. He then moved into the finance side of things because he had a good head for numbers, and worked his way up to being their Administrative Director, still in charge of finance, but unable to call himself a Finance Director because he didn't have any degrees relevant to finance. He then began doing some studying and is now self-employed as an accountant. I've got a friend that studied English Literature at university and now works as a website manager for a shipping company. Does he have any formal web/IT training? Nope.
To me, based on my experiences and the experiences of those around me, the degree isn't all that important when you're young. Employers are more interested in work experience and job history, with someone that has four years in the same job being a more attractive prospect than someone that has a degree and has worked four jobs in three years. I'm fully resigned to the fact that, later in life, I will need to do some kind of a degree or certificate if I am to get the top level management jobs, and by the time I get there, my undergraduate and masters won't mean diddly squat. At a younger age, it's more important to have a degree in something (it doesn't so much matter what) because there are a lot of people with degrees and if you don't have one then you're fighting an uphill battle from the start. Later in life, you need to have a degree in something relevant, and as no-one really knows where they'll end up, you can't really plan for it so you have you start studying again, after you've settled into a career.
Obvious exceptions here include doctors, pharmacists, professors and the like, all of whom use their degrees straight from the off if they get a job in the field that they studied. To everyone else, just pick a degree that sounds interesting (and doesn't narrow your options too much) and then go to university for the life skills you'll gain outside of the classroom. I'm not convinced that my degrees were worth it, but university was the first time I lived away from home, and I learned to cook and do laundry, but also how to manage my own time and how to deal with people. You've got a few safety nets as a student, so you aren't completely on your own, but you've got freedom and time to try things out and learn about yourself. I would always encourage going to university, but I don't think it really matters what your degree is in, unless you've got very defined career plans already. Otherwise, just grab a casual degree in business or IT, and then hit the bars for a good time.