The thing is that if you have the degree you will also build up experience and then you will have both. So once someone has matured you will be comparing degree+experience with experience and on average the graduate will be better
...
It is also pretty obvious that to get the job done today a non-graduate with experience is probably better than a graduate with none, but on average the graduates will be better once they have some real world experience.
Yep.
An engineer in the vain I'm talking about is much more capable than a self-taught hobbyist/tinkerer that has learned how to do electronics. They always will be. The reason is that a self-taught electronics person, almost always, will only have a level of understanding in electronics. An engineering graduate will have a very broad and somewhat narrow understanding of all the physical sciences that come into play in electronics. But moreover, they can specialize and acquire that deep and narrow understanding just like the self-taught person in any area they want to. But the self-taught person will usually never have the broad understanding of math, physics, chemistry, and so on that the university graduate has. That will almost always give the engineering graduate a huge advantage to change and adapt as needed to any new project or job, and to be able to analyze circuits and other processes that no self-taught hobbyist that some company deems is an "engineer".
Heck, in the lab I worked in I once had to design mechanical parts to make a certain system work better. That's what I mean - you can't be sure what type of challenge awaits you in the real world.
Some of the things that engineering students such as myself learned on a formal level that most self-taught people don't touch -
Statics
Chemistry
Physics I & II
College algebra
Trigonometry
Calculus I & II
Other physical science electives
Electrical power
FORTRAN (yes this was 1980's, but I adapted and learned C as needed on my own)
Microprocessors
Digital systems
RF transmission lines
etc.
And the other things such as English, humanities, history, sociology - right, all useless to some people here. But as I said this is not trade school - it's an EDUCATION.
Sure a self-taught person might know little trig or some logic and so on, but they just haven't been exposed to it on a more rigorous level.
Not to mention the core courses in electrical engineering theory. If you are only interested in electronics at a certain level then teach yourself what you need and as much as you need. But don't kid yourself and put your background on the same level as a university graduate and call yourself an engineer. That's why I am against using the term "engineer' for any non-university graduate. But I can't do much about it.