Sundays are study days from now on. Hopefully I can catch up.
It's only University level certifications that make any difference for your prospective employers, but that does not necessarily guarantee the skills you need as an engineer (if that's what you are aiming for), and many businesses recognise this.
I got into full time programming job at around your age after a variety of education routes in sciences and arts (no comp-sci) and variety of crappy jobs.
No one seemed to be particularly interested in my lack of certifications when it came to interview time (even though they all have them on the job app). Once I could talk shop and show some small pieces of work and my potential could be recognised I was hireable.
I'm not saying it's ever easy to get a foot in the door, but if you focus on the work, your ability will show through in the interview process (if they are not simply a large corporation hiring through box ticking criteria, probably a bad place to start out when you are a junior anyway).
This is a prime example of what I believe is wrong with traditional education (i'm not judging your teaching ability of course), as you are obviously aware, this is more of a box ticking activity than learning in the sense of having any actual understanding.
This has always personally caused me a great deal of trouble, for whatever reason I can only learn substantially through understanding - attempting to memorise procedures when I don't have time to understand the underlying workings is like trying to eat cardboard for me, in that sense I am a bad student and am exiled to purely self taught methods.
Although I am quite content learning on my own, it makes me feel like much of my formal education was a big waste of time, If I could go back in time knowing this I would avoid it altogether.
My experience is hopefully a more dated view by now, I also hold out hope that the new exposure the internet has given courses through MOCs who provide no kind of certification will by proxy refocus traditional education more on the value of learning than certification.
Also in the UK at least there are some new ranking systems emerging for universities that are more focused on learning like TEF, although indirect that is at least a step in the right direction.