Earn Your degree is not just about acquiring knowledge in your chosen profession. Going to college or university is about building a network of friends, colleagues, experts (your professors), alumni. These networks later help you succeed in life, whether to ask for a favor, or advice, or to get a job, or to get someone else a job, etc.
Aside from the above mentioned massive benefit of a network that you can use for the greater good, a design degree, for example, can be used for designing functioning toilets without regular running water for kids in an impoverished community that an industrial designer friend of mine did. There are so many practical applications for making life better for everyone, that you can use your design knowledge and experience towards.