re: College Degree or Work Experience?

As others have said, more than just those two simple criteria go into a decision to hire someone. I can tell you from personal experience that not having a degree basically puts a cap on where you can go upwardly in most companies unless you really know someone. Gone are the days of you being able to go to work someplace and work your way up to middle management just on your work ethic and ability to know the business. Now they just hire someone with a degree to fill that position that they can train to run the peons how upper management thinks the peons should be handled.