Many of those with graduate degrees are just prolonging their entry into the real world.
Looking back on my career, the professors who discouraged me from going to grad school were probably the most influential of my life. For most people, graduate school is an economic dead end. They learn more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
Specialization is for insects. I’d strongly recommend that young people get out into the world and start the real learning.
It puts you in a tenuous position. When the chickens come home to roost and the economy collapses, having a degree in Progressive Multicultural Enviromental Studies will be worth considerably less than simply being able to say "I know how to fix a generator."
With the increasing viabiliy of online learning, and the increasing number of accredited universities that offer online graduate courses, it's increasingly the better idea to go to work, and let the company pay for your master's degree as you work on it part-time.
There's a great book titled "Under the Red Sea Sun" by salvage officer Cmdr. Edward Ellsberg. The Red Sea book told of his typically-innovative American approach to a wrecked Italian naval base in Eritrea in 1943. One of his many "impossible" projects was to raise a huge floating dry dock which had seven of eight compartments blown out and an unexploded bomb in the eighth. All the other salvage experts said it was either impossible or would take 50 divers and 200 mechanics six-months to raise, with no guarantee even that would work.
He did it in nine days, with a few American supervisors and some Italian POWS.
Alluding to your comment, he said "The trouble with 'experts' is that they know so much about how to do something a certain way that they cannot see any other method."