Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not exactly true. It's not that an undergraduate degree is worthless, but it's become pretty standard. You may not stand above the rest with just a degree, but you certainly fall below the rest without one. I don't mean this from an intelligence or skill perspective, some of the smartest people I know don't have college degrees. But when the big companies are recruiting from college career fairs or listing it…
I have a friend who worked for 5 years at a big consultancy company and he got stonewalled for getting promoted to a team lead role because he didn't have a masters degree. Like, he was getting top marks every year at performance review, clearly knew how to do the job, but some internal policy somewhere said that you can't be a lead without a masters degree, sorry. He did manage to arrange with them that they would p…
Well, at least he scored a degree out of it.
I'm torn on this. I'm not sure I see it all that different than if they wanted to make sure someone they were moving into a managerial role had knowledge to back it up, and wanted them to take managerial courses. It's good that the company paid for the courses, a bit less good that it was in personal time (but it's also theoretically beneficial for the person and isn't tied to the company, so I don't fault that much).
If they outright offer this path in in this situation and it doesn't have to be brought up by the employee, I think that's a pretty acceptable solution to requiring that degree for the position, if the company thinks it's really important to have for some reason.