As a degreeless, high school drop out who works for a very large corporation that's not the case. In a time where many are screaming about shortages in skilled IT people, mandating a degree is only going to narrow the already small pool of possible candidates down even further for no explicable gain. Many job advertisements I've seen will say "degree or relative experience", the latter being the key part here.
A degree is a proxy. A recruiter without specific knowledge cannot assess a developer's technical abilities in any meaningful way (even an extremely experienced developer can't reliably do so). The degree implies a school continuously assessed the individual abilities over the course of several years and found them acceptable enough to issue the degree. A degree offsets responsibility from the recruiter to the school/institution.
Also from the potential hire himself. It's not that he sucks, his college didn't prepare him for this new role. It's not his lack of passion and really any deep interest in the craft, it's just that he had wrong lecturers, also most of them even weren't there to lecture most of the time, so what can you expect?
So now we can hire him and train him for a year or more, because without it he's completely useless, but that's ok, because he's just like we expect him to be. On the other hand, this one here who was willing to take all the responsibility for himself, who's eager to prove his actual skill doing useful things, he's too dangerous, because... What? Because he could actually end up doing something, and then we'd feel bad?
I'm not saying what you say is wrong, like in untrue, but I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.
> a school continuously assessed the individual abilities over the course of several years
Yeah. Some abilities. That differs from person to person and from college to college, but these abilities may or may not be the ones you want to optimize for.
> but that's ok, because he's just like we expect him to be.
For large companies, predictability beats quality. Keep in mind strict business processes exist to defend organizations from incompetent workers, even at the cost of limiting competent ones. Incompetent workers are cheaper. Since the processes prevent competent ones from achieving outstanding results, there is an obvious incentive to hire only incompetent ones.
> I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.
Not sure about fairness. I certainly don't like it.
> Yeah. Some abilities.
Those are the abilities large banks and insurance companies want. For the average non-technical manager, being able to consider developers as interchangeable cogs beats developers that are impossible for managers to characterize or predict.
