In my fields I can tell you for sure you're going to need a bachelors to even be considered for a position, a Master's or Phd are even better. You're simply not even getting past the recruiter and or HR. When I was a hiring manager I did hire people who were IN college, and some of them never finished their degrees until I beat them into submission to do it. The reason is that while you can get into jobs paying 150-200 BASE without one if you're exceptional, you won't go much past that in your career, you will not be considered for leadership roles and so on. You can do entry level tech and maybe some 1099 work without one, but you're kind of stuck there until you make a name for yourself if you do, which is like 5% of the population that is capable and has the raw processing power and self-start capability that is needed.
If you get a bullshyte degree you'll get bullshyte returns from it. I'm in California, and for its many warts, it is easy to get a good education for not much money. You're not going to Stanford or CalTech, but you can get into UCSD, UCSF, Cal Poly, Davis, etc. all top flight public schools, and between grants, scholarships work/study programs if you're smart you can get out for well under 6 figures worth of debt, I know, I did 38k for my latest degree, that earns 125-150 out the door, I knew that going in, and chose to do it for work/life balance. If you get into a good degree program at any of the universities listed above you can make even more.
7 years ago I had entry level engineers in my organization that I hired that started at 150, 1 year of experience. So braaaaap, you're wrong.
BRAAAAAP, wrong again. I have personal experience in this.
You may not be up to date on AI. But it cannot replace human interaction, which is necessary in almost all fields, medicine, and yes technology and yes even AI. AI solutions cannot sell themselves, cannot conceptualize it self, cannot build AI infrastructure, build data centers, install routers, run cabling, or provide IaaS/PasS to those who build end use products. We are a very long way from Cortana and Lt. Data, like a long long way. The human brain is better at complex problems than AI will be for hundreds or even maybe thousands of years, AI looks magical to laymen because of its raw capacity to run thousands of scenarios in a few milliseconds, but the solutions must still adhere to litmus test cases to be viable in the real world and those test cases and standards will always be created by humans.