something to look at for people wanting a good paying job and college may not be for them. (yes it has limited enrollment but worth looking at)
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/careers/fl-jetblue-pilot-training-20160308-story.html
Your title is misleading as all airlines either require or strongly prefer a minimum 4 year degree to become a first officer or captain. By not having a degree, you would be at a major competitive disadvantage.
Actually, although a college degree is preferred, it is not required.
http://pilots.jetblue.com/gateway-select
It does cost $125,000 over four years of training.
Training leads to employment as a first officer in Jet Blue’s smaller E190 jets. https://www.aviationinterviews.com/pilot/payrates/jetBlue-40.html claims to describe pay rates. But note that pilots fly far fewer hours than the number of hours that most full time employees work, according to http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1807/what-is-common-number-of-flight-hours-a-year-for-an-airline-pilot .
no college is needed. in the past especially during the booming growth of airlines post world war 2 pilots came out of the military and there was a steady supply of pilots. now obviously that supply had become much smaller. I would not care if my pilot when to college, just that they know how to safely fly a plane.
You need a college degree to fly for the majors/FedEx/UPS, and that’s always what the goal is. People don’t get into aviation to fly for a commuter all their life, and even Jet Blue, for the most part.
There is no shortage of applicants for those airlines, they have several thousand applications on file. The shortage of pilots is for people willing to fly commuter aircraft at starvation wages. People are generally only willing to do that in order to build up time, the work is too abusive and the pay too low.
Aviation is a tricky business. I’ve always thought of it as a very expensive form of trade school, and that isn’t a slight at all, I have great respect for the trades. Once you get up to the big airline level, yes, you must have a degree. It doesn’t really matter what it is in though, I think the more important thing is your flight experience. (My mom met a pilot who had his degree in theater.) The thing is with flying, you have to have a passion for it or else it is pointless. You aren’t going to get rich in most cases as a professional pilot or work regular hours. Most of them are paid low wages and do it because they love it and are trying to rack up hours to move to some other level/get another certification. Many of the pilots that fly for the big airlines (like Southwest, Delta, etc.) are ex-military pilots, who come in with an immense amount of flight experience that would be very difficult to match for a civilian.
As the saying goes, it’s easy to make a small fortune in aviation - just start with a large one. :((
Crud this thread is scaring me. 
Are you or you kid going into professional aviation? @SouthFloridaMom9
You would be surprised hiw picky the big guys are right now, it’s ridiculous. Plenty of flight time, but not over a certain threshold, they deem you untrainable. My airline scores what degree you have, where you got it at, how long it took to get. Want you to have community service (give me a break), what was your graduating GPA (even 30 years ago). Sure what kind of flight time you have is important, but you have to have a lot of other stuff before they’ll even pull your app to look it.
To me, it’s insanity. My kids did community service every year starting kindergarten. I think they just have too many applications to look at.
^^ Probably a good thing I’ve made the decision to pursue flying as a hobby, not a career. I’ll never fly a 737, but I’ll just have to be content with Cessnas and sailplanes.
Is JetBlue not finding enough pilot candidates who are willing to work for starvation wages? What’s the going rate for a First Officer on a regional airline? $20,000?
ha ha no @albert69 - just have flown (as a passenger) on many commuter flights.
Actually, Jet Blue first officer pay is fairly decent, not like the commuters. I doubt they have a shortage of applicants. However, maybe they have a shortage of people that stay, because right now the majors are hiring like crazy, and it is expensive to keep training people endlessly. Maybe this keeps them there substantially longer, or even makes money for the airline. 125K is a lot to shell out, and other training programs (while still costly) are much cheaper.
In all honesty, I haven’t looked closely at this yet. But I do see a problem if they are trying hard to keep people in, because of the money. And then you have a guaranteed job, even if they might not have hired you in the first place. I know anyone coming out of the military is a guarantee of a good pilot, you wouldn’t survive or you’d get booted otherwise.
Lol, I see. @SouthFloridaMom9 Hopefully your pilots love the fact that they can fly at all and can concentrate through the hunger pains. :-?? 
I keep thinking of that dirtbag FO on Germanwings, who killed so many people when he committed suicide. Doubt he would have been hired or passed a psych evaluation, but since he was in the ab ignitio program, they really wanted to keep him. At least, if I remrmbered it right.
I remember a few years back taking an evening flight to Huntsville from DCA and the inbound flight was delayed. Our pilot was there at the gate with us. He looked about 50 lbs overweight, dressed a bit slovenly and disheveled. I was kind of wondering what kind of pilot he was doing this milk run flight on a commuter. Turned out he was very competent and skilled and it was one of the smoothest flights I’ve ever flown on a commuter jet (It was an ERJ). I imagined he was flying because he loved it, and wasn’t getting rich from doing it.
A large part of the reason why a critical mass of WWII military pilots didn’t have college education was because the wartime needs of the armed forces to ramp up the supply of well-trained pilots right before and during the early-mid part of the war quickly forced them to relax educational requirements.
Before WWII with rare exceptions one actually needed to have been a college or FSA graduate or had at least 2-3 years of college to be a military pilot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Cadet_Training_Program_%28USAAF%29
Incidentally, the #3 US Korean War Ace Manuel J. Fernandez initially joined pilot training straight out of high school in 1943 when demand for pilots was still very high.
His lack of a college education later caused him problems in the mid-late '50s when the USAF started the process of weeding out officers/pilots without college educations and he found his high school education left him woefully unprepared for the high academic and technical entrance requirements of test pilot school he was encouraged to join on strength of his Korean War combat record. This led him to make the unfortunate decision to cheat on a calculus research project. His being caught effectively ended any further prospects for promotion and further high profile assignments in the USAF.
“I remember a few years back taking an evening flight to Huntsville from DCA and the inbound flight was delayed. Our pilot was there at the gate with us. He looked about 50 lbs overweight, dressed a bit slovenly and disheveled. I was kind of wondering what kind of pilot he was doing this milk run flight on a commuter. Turned out he was very competent and skilled and it was one of the smoothest flights I’ve ever flown on a commuter jet (It was an ERJ). I imagined he was flying because he loved it, and wasn’t getting rich from doing it”
Flying multiple legs on a commuter when you are older is not fun, I doubt he was doing it for the love of flying, but just staying in the game. The market for pilots goes up and down with the economy. Many people have been furloughed over the years, many carriers have gone bankrupt. It can be very difficult to get hired and even highly experienced people might end up at a commuter for awhile, so it’s not always for people building time. Some of the captains pay can be decent, certainly compared to a desk job. After I got laid off at American, I would have considered doing it for awhile. It is much easier to get hired if your flying skills are current.
But it costs (in both time and money) as much as or more than college, and the entry level pay after completion is not necessarily better than that which a new bachelor’s degree graduate can find. It is also in the airline industry, which is not the most stable or profitable one to tie your career to.