Your argument holds no water. Many of the appraisers who have degrees, whether Cert Gen or Cert Res went on to have better careers and went on to get an MAI or SRA or went into the management end. IDK how the grandfathered in Cert gens with no degree do compared to the competition. And not every graduate has high student debt. There are state colleges with lower tuition, the GI bill for service, scholarships etc. The argument from non-degree people is always along the lines above and misses the point- it is the humanities courses in college that develop the perspective and reasoning, not the hard skills courses. That is why the military, law enforcement want a degree for more responsibility and positions where decision-making and strategy prevail.
The proof is the really low performance of some appraisers who manage to pass the rote questions on a license exam, but then get stumped as soon as an assignment requires critical thinking. We see these posts all the time on here, asking for help because they are facing some difficulty in an assignment and lack the capacity to reason through it and apply what they memorized (memorized as opposed to learn, being unable to apply it other than in a rote situation )
It goes without saying there are excellent appraisers who have no degree and likely some bad ones with a degree; however, the large number of really shoddy work that the lack of entry brings about, coupled with the AMC's low fee system for profiteerign, won. Dropping the degree requirement was about getting a higher volume of warm bodies into the field who would work cheaper to benefit the AMC's and the GSE's were on board with it along with them enabling the next step down for even less qualified ( no appraisal license ) warm bodies to do the PDC collection for even less money. That is where the res mortgage lending field ended up when that first step was taken to remove the college degree. Those without degrees would have been grandfathered in and benefited. But they chose to make a resentment-filled argument and look where it ended. The reality of the outcome speaks for itself.
