r2pgl

This x1000. Universities are not trade schools but definitely over the last couple decades have been used as such by companies because for certain fields, that's "all there was". Couple that with the "everyone must go to college" mantra of the past decade or so and you get the prevailing thought you have described.

I had the same issue with motivation + time but I already had my site setup/building via hugo. One day I said enough and I looked into it. In about 10 minutes I had it all setup with ssl, my custom domain, etc.