While I feel that the cost of college is totally out of line with the salaries most people make, I know that I wouldn't have been hired without a degree.
Although I'm far from a Thiel fan, he at least offered an alternative approach using his own money (not a lot, mind you, but still).
Of course the environment changes over time. And so trying to create a business selling computers from your dorm room or moving to California planning to teach yourself to code and then [something] is probably not likely to work out so well. But I think the moral of these stories is often one of creativity and drive. Now teaching oneself programming is trite. When Ellison did so in the 70s, it was something extremely uncommon to do which meant it had vastly more value.
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In reality, I think our opinions are going to be driven by our experiences. In contrast to your experience, I've only ever even mentioned my degree for exactly one job. And that job very much did not require a degree. Since then I've found endless opportunity in spite of the fact I'm pretty much the embodiment of anti-networking: dumb phone, no social media, etc. But I enjoy development. Create one product that's impressive and useful, and it's like the world just opens up to you. A lesson I rather wished I'd learned about 15 years ago. But hey, something I can pass on to my kids - perhaps not so different than one William Gates who enlisted in the army right at school, served in WW2, went to college on the GI bill, and eventually had a somewhat more well known William.
In any case, it's always made me question the value of the degree. I came from a very poor family which means that sheet of paper had quite the price attached to it. And that was before prices really went into lala land.
In either case, I'd fully agree with you though that a degree makes things much easier for most people. However, I think that is rapidly changing. Most of the big tech employers are now dropping college degree requirements and I expect we'll gradually see the same in ever more fields. A degree used to say a good deal about a person, and all positive. Now that's changing, and so the market is adjusting in response.
You're proposing that the executives don't know what recruiting practices their company is employing to sustain talent for their operations?
Cmon, that's ridiculous. They would be terrible executives if this were true.
Most people I meet agree that recruiting is broken. A huge part of this is regulation. The education system is integrated into the backbone of society which is maintained through regulation.
If you were hired for only a degree then I would be wary of Price's law. https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
I apologize for the extreme edge case.
In a way, the applicant is still hired because of a degree rather than skill if that's what's used for initial filtering. Everything after that is derivative reasoning.