First I'll give you a harsh truth OP. There is absolutely no shortage of skilled labour in the audio engineering field. Unlike fields like engineering, the number of audio engineers totally outstrips the number of people needed.
However. I know people who've made it in audio engineering to a variety of degrees. I know a guy who works for Ninja Tune, mostly doing mastering, and also does a whole bunch of audio restoration work for museums and archives. He got where he is because a) he is the most charismatic person I have ever met and b) he has an obsessive precision in his work and has dedicated most of his formative years to understanding esoteric concepts in audio that other people ignore because it's dull and they think they'll never need it.
Another guy I know does production for a number of mid tier industrial bands. He succeeds because he knows the genre and it's needs inside out and was a major figure in the current scenes development. Also, its a niche that he's cornered very well. As a day job, he currently does Electrical engineering on the audio systems of oil rigs. He was smart enough to choose a university course that also taught electrical engineering aspects that were generalisable.
I also know some successful academic musicians who got where they are through years of plain hard work.
Fact is this OP, if you really want to do this as a career you better fucking love it. Or at least be obsessed enough to dedicate yourself to it. You will not find yourself in a nice studio doing lines of coke like in the 80's. You will have to forge your own path and fight the whole way.