Do you have to live so relentlessly in reality?

whereas I , with my bachelors degree in clowning, have been head hunted for my last two corporate jobs.

Who even funds degrees like that?

You end up with fewer job prospects than a GED

No one says it was the only way? But one of the requirements of getting that PhD is to expand knowledge so it's 100% applicable

You might be surprised to learn it doesn't actually suggest a PhD is the only way to expand human knowledge. No one was disregarded.

I don't think it's meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.

Presumably you could meet the boundary with "a dollah fifty in late fees at the public library" and find a way to push through from there. You'd have to find a way to publish or share your new knowledge. Studying at uni gives you access to experts in their own thing that likely have knowledge that could help you with your thing as well as a system designed to churn out these papers when you eventually find your thing.

Every day people discover new things but it takes attention, effort, and will to PROVE it's a new thing and more yet to share that with the world. Too bad you can't get an honorary PhD for doing that, at least not reliably.

The visual is more about highlighting specialization and its distance from the limit of human knowledge. You often can't represent every aspect of a complex subject at the same time on a single visual. Kinda like how you can't represent the solar system distances and planet sizes to scale on a single page, you have to pick one.

To be fair, most of "all human knowledge" is stuff like when the last time was that each person on the planet pooped.

Why do you think it discredis it?

Knowledge is a grower and a shower

It is from Matt Might, here.

Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.

College is what you put into it. A lot of people don't get into the networking side of it because it's never really introduced to them. Mostly professors look for those who are "turned on" to bring onto projects like that, that is, those that are engaged and asking questions and curious.

Youngins, lpt: talk to your professors and let them know you are interested and ask questions. It's what you are there for- access to brains.

five year bachelors’ equivalent

In Germany (and Europe, I believe, since the Bologna reforms), a bachelor’s is (usually) 3 years and a master’s is 5 years. That might be why you got to do research and I didn’t. How long are your master’s courses?