[lucb1e]

It's a bit more terse than I'd have put it, but I was about to reply along the same lines when I reloaded and saw your comment. While the supermarket employee (for those who don't know Target, it's a USA-specific thing afaik) might not be able to prove some of those things like doing research for a 1940s soldier costume, it's indeed not that hard and doesn't need a university study. Many of GP's points will be much harder to prove than to learn in the first place. And so I would also conclude that years of study might just not be required to start doing the job. Trying to be respectful of an actor's skill, since I truly don't think I could do that job well (or at least not without months or years of trying, and even then idk), it also doesn't strike me as requiring deep study. That's just not required for showing up to work on time (I'm cherry-picking one of the points here, to be fair).

Even for IT there's an argument to be made that it's super easy to learn 80% at home and do maybe some hands-on work in a lab with 500 virtual computers (that you wouldn't easily setup by yourself in a realistic manner), then go into the job. After a magazine got me started on HTML with a 3-page explanation at 12yo, things just started rolling from there and I was basically always ahead of what I was expected to know by year x of the study because I had already done stuff out of personal interest. Don't need an N-year study there, either. Engineering (in the sense of building a bridge that stands 100 years) is probably different though.