Interesting thread and an interesting topic for young and "old."
I'm 51. In my last year of high school (1986) I was accepted at UW (Western) for Materials Engineering. After a year I realized the material and subject matter were not to my liking. I had always been a hands-on kid, worked on cars and loved computers (C64, PETs etc) in high-school and at home and found the theory taught at university simply didn't grab me. I tried a 2nd year there but ultimately decided to follow another path and entered college of "applied arts and technology" (is that still a term today?) for electronics technology. I loved it -- very practical with enough theory to understand the principles -- and ended up with a bunch of bursaries and grants and awards, including the Governor General's award for highest academic standing. I'm only saying that as an indication that I loved what I was doing there, not to boast; it was, after all, "just" college. In those days college was seen as a joke, where the dummies went to take Basket Weaving 101 etc.
I was hired immediately out of school into a Waterloo firm and stayed there for 17 years; 3 years into my time there I was promoted to Engineering and spent the remaining time designing medical and industrial metrology equipment, coding embedded controllers and running the regulatory compliance group.
In 2008 that company went through an upheaval and let a bunch of folks go, myself included. I did a stint with a medical start-up helping them establish a QMS but really needed to get back into electronics. I interviewed with a robotics start-up in 2011 and was nervous as hell. Having "only" a college diploma from 20 years ago I thought I was wasting my time. Turns out they didn't care; they wanted my experience. I spent 7 years there and, as the company grew, felt like I'd become a pretty important part of the embedded design group despite being "only" a college guy.
I was tasked with interviewing many candidates for permanent and co-op positions. I came to understand that a degree and/or grades only told a small part of the story of the individual and that answers to questions about hobbies and other interests, what they did in their leisure time, examples of home-made projects and so on gave us a much clearer picture. We'd also administer a very basic quiz of 4 pages that ranged from solving a simple resistor divider to safety circuit design and were often stunned by how poorly folks with an otherwise impressive CV did on even the most basic technical questions. The quiz reflected broadly the sort of work the individual would be doing on a daily basis so the results were pretty important.
The upshot of this is that the degrees and grades didn't reflect an ability to problem solve. In most cases, especially evident with co-ops, it was more an indication of rote learning and/or remembering lines from a script.
Anyway, as I age and the world moves on, I question the value of pursuing a degree. Perhaps there's an inflection point where, as long as you can prove basic competence in the field for which you are applying, your work experience means more than a piece of paper that says you basically have a good memory. I will say the apparent prejudice against those only having college papers scares me a bit. The company I'm with now -- 3-1/2 months in -- didn't care. I fear that won't always be the case.