Chad Cloman expresses it beautifully above.

There's also the problem that us oldies without degrees learned quite close to the metal, and moved up the stack as time passed. So I've done everything from raw machine code, to assembler, BASIC, PL/I, C, Python and PHP amongst many others. I got to grow as the industry grew. A newbie to the industry doesn't have that luxury of spending years solving how to make something reasonably interesting work quickly on a microprocessor by directly addressing the graphics memory. I was on a huge government project in 2001 and even then, it was amazing how few people who'd come through the bootcamp approach pioneered by the big consultancies had heard of bitwise operators. Which mostly didn't matter, except on the day when something couldn't be made to work because it relied on being able to find out the value of a single bit stored somewhere. The dev who'd done that was solving a problem for some low level compiled code to run super-fast, and he didn't honestly care that later devs working way up on the UI would struggle. But hey, every coder knows bitwise operators, no? Well... actually no. Surprisingly few do. But because I'm old and coded from 1983 on, I kind of had to know that stuff in order to modify sprites on the screen.

So us oldies have to realise that the industry is not at all in the same place as it was in when we stepped in. A degree can help people know a lot of this and stop them making mad schemas or storing PHP objects in the database.