Our job market is also based on largely on academia and health care, both stable/growing industries.

I put in 1,501 offers over the course of two weeks, which required that I essentially play hookie from my full-time job in academia in order to submit and follow up on all of the agents who responded to my initial offers.

I would venture to say a master's is the new academia standard.

Other than outliers like Penfed that use NextGen or lenders that use auto-enhanced or bank card-enhanced the other variants are academia and trivial pursuit questions.

You're comparing a college degree to a mentoring program, and with all due respect to the academia world - they don't make people prosperous, they just train them to get a JOB.  

You might find out there is more value in alternative or specific education outside of traditional academia.

I started in academia as a grad student, went on to teach for a decade, then made the turn to real estate. 

Afterall, nearly 100% of today's published material is quite biased (if not completely CONTROLLED... like the 'fake news,' to 'academia,' as two extreme examples) and clearly has "control the meme," 'end goal' objectives.

I worked with some institutional RE firms in the past and I have to say that some of the smartest people I met were engineers (either in undergrad, grad) who then took on finance in academia or practice. 

Diverse industries, academia, healthcare.. auto production and housing got hit hard in 2007 leading to phenom deals for investors with enough cash to complete rehabs and hold long term.