Mediocre in what sense? You can be a sh*tty person and still be intelligent.
You definitely need to be smart to get a master's degree, not everyone can do it.
And the people who say that usually have not been to university. It's a way to reassure themselves.
Companies value university degrees because it shows that you can think critically. In other words, that you're not dumb.
You can't just write "I'm intelligent because I say so" on your resume and expect to be taken seriously.
Degree's may not be the best way of measuring someone's intelligence, but it already tells a lot about a person.
I did international baccalaureate pre-university.
Then did a year of engineering, had very high grades, switched to joint honours mathematics and physics, finished my bachelors on time and with extra courses. I did this at one of the last remaining North American schools without grade inflation.
I nailed 3 of 4 standardized tests on the entry to graduate school.
Then I got a masters and a PhD at a top-10 department in the USA, and upon graduation I had high paying, high-prestige offers in Australia, the USA, and Switzerland.
In my time I have studied with many others, graded many classes, tutored many classes, and been a teaching assistant for many classes.
Are you done?
University degrees in and of themselves are not that meaningful. There are a lot of average, mediocre people who manage to get through. Including for masters degrees. It doesn't mean as much as you think.
There are some smart people in university. And there are dumb people there. And outside the university system, there are smart and dumb people. For the most part people go because that's the expectation. You finish high school and then you go to university.
Speaking for myself, it's not specifically the PhD diploma that matters, it's the fact I discovered several things that nobody else had ever discovered before, that I did so through hard work, and that I convinced other researchers of it.
