> "Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones?"

Exactly. Neither that comment nor its parent said degrees are necessary for education. Both were defending the value of education that extends beyond it's signal to the job market.

The only extent to which people are conflating degrees and education is the empirically obvious observation that most people don't get much actionable education beyond their time in degree programs, individual counterexamples notwithstanding.

They didn't say explicitly...but you have to look at the context of the conversation...perhaps I misread it