My heart hurts for you, reading your essays. Keep ploughing, don't give up. Being persistent is winning. As the old saying goes, "there is nothing more common than unrewarded genius, perseverance alone is omnipotent." If you think you can you can and if you think you can't you are right. Be indefatigable.

The reason everyone requires a BA degree for entry level nowadays is because even that is often less of an education than we came out of high school with in the 60's and 70's. When most kids came out of public schools knowing how to spell, read, do basic math functions without a calculator, they could fill out a job application, and in a large segment, of males mostly, had taken maybe several 'industrial arts' courses and had developed actual skillsets, etc. ad. infinitum.

Today, or lately, not so much. I suspect a high percentage of those even with BAs do not have the three R skills that were possessed by the majority of public school users of the 60's and 70's. So the social promotion thing lowered the bar in many ways, but raised it in others. Now they consider a BA a requirement as a high school diploma was 50 years ago. Not because of how much smarter we have become.

Babe Ruth struck out more than any other batter of his day. But it is not what he is remembered for. He never quit swinging for the fences.

Good luck!

We had an opening for an engineer. Our boss told us he required two years experience with our graphics system. "Oh", sez I, "you mean our proprietary graphics system that nobody who hasn't already worked here has ever seen. That reduces the pool of candidates to a half dozen people and we don't want any of them back." He stormed off muttering.
My point was always that you needed to hire people who are good at learning, not ones that already know what you're looking for. In six months you are going to want them to know the next great thing and the way to save money is to have people who can pick up new skills as needed.
Sounds like the capitalist swine have learned nothing since then.

didn't see this coming.
Like a freight train.
Don't know if it was G. Dubya that started this trend, or Bubba (or maybe even Ronaldus Magnamus by firing the air traffic controllers), but this trend of hiring from "offshore" (rather than hire college grads) has been around a decade or more now.
TPTB /Oligarchy doesn't want to pay anybody anything for their labor, so they pay as little as possible, and if they can pay less than that they do. They look at us as so much dog (food) not deserving of a nickel. As I say on FB there's no cure for the GOP (or PTB /Oligarchy). All the same to me, although the Dim party these days just as complicit. These sonsabitches could wake up some day looking for the maid to wipe their ass and clean their toilet bowl only to discover the maid has perished alongside the rest of us, and the asshat has to wipe his own ass and clean his own toilet.
A shame.

There are no formulas that work anymore. Maybe nurses? Certainly not teachers.

Around 2003 I saw this coming my girl (now wife since'06) was working as a waitress in a little rural Nevada town and the recession was already visible on the horizon.

She was discussing what to do for her future (she was about 22 at the time) and after some thought I suggested nursing because, " Eventuality someone's gonna have to take care of us old bastards."

It hasn't been easy, particularly trying to do it without accumulating tons of student loans, and took us almost 13 years but she got her RN (skipped LPN and went to RN from CNA,which was a nice bump!)

It took about 6 weeks to land her first nursing job, not the best of locations (a jail) but within 6 months and even more so after a year, she started getting lots of recruiters calling or mailing.

In her first almost 2 years of nursing she's switched employers 3 times for better offers already.

I guess the moral of the story is nursing and medicine are booming, at least until all the boomers are gone...

Or unless the health care system gets rationed for use by the wealthy only...