College Degree vs. Trade Experience

My husband is currently awaiting a commercial check ride date. I know he has a long way to go, but given the time it takes to get a degree I figured I’d ask.

My husband does not have a college degree. He grew up in the electrical trades and worked his way from helper to superintendent from an electrical contractor. From there he got hired at a general contractor (where we met) and worked his way up from Field Superintendent to Project Superintendent for $100m projects. For those unfamiliar to the trades, this is a site leadership position with a lot of experience in managing technical scopes, people, schedules, communicating with clients, etc. Basically he went from working his tools with no experience to being on-site leadership managing a ton of risk over 8ish years. The commercial construction/GC industry is pretty open to non college degree holders given how much they appreciate technical knowledge from learning a trade.

We were able to cash flow his flight training over the past year while we both worked and he recently quit to wrap up his commercial & cfi and go full time. His end goal is the airlines eventually at a legacy.

I know hiring is and will become more competitive in the coming years. I see plenty of posts about how having a degree will make you more competitive. My question is: would an airline look at my husband’s trade and professional history positively despite not having a degree? Do they explicitly filter by degree having vs not? Do they understand the value of someone knowing electrical systems and having leadership experience or could his application not see the light of day because of it? We aren’t worried about having a degree to fall back on in case this doesn’t work out as his recent employer would hire him back tomorrow, he could go back to his tools if times ever got extremely rough, and my income is enough for us to live off of. It would pain me to shell out 40-50k for a meaningless degree just to be seen and not to be used.

I appreciate the insight!