To them, all the lectures, exams, and late-night cramming were meaningless. A diploma didn't guarantee respect, status, or even a decent paycheck. Sure, the "educated" folks liked to pretend their degree was some magical talisman… but in the real world? Degrees didn't pay rent, didn't fix a broken car, didn't put food on the table. And so many of them still ended up stuck in menial jobs, barely scraping by, doing work that didn't challenge them, didn't inspire them, and certainly didn't reflect the effort they had put in.
From this angle, formal education looked like a scam: you invest years of your life, swallow lectures you'll forget, learn theories you'll never use, all for a piece of paper that might not even get you ahead of someone who'd hustled on the streets or started working young. And to be honest, they weren't entirely wrong. Real life had a way of exposing gaps in the system.
