First I would suggest that being able to teach oneself and having a university degree are not mutually exclusive - and indeed a lot of courses are so bad you ne

First I would suggest that being able to teach oneself and having a university degree are not mutually exclusive - and indeed a lot of courses are so bad you need to be able to teach yourself in order to successfully escape them That said, a lot of people in both categories aren't that great in the workplace. Either through lack of discipline, lack of experience, emotional problems that prevent them acknowledging negative feedback and using it to improve themselves, or a general desire to overthrow capitalism whilst reading Facebook. But none of that has anything to do with going to university which is a privilege that may or may not be available to somebody given their class, background, and general life experiences. As long as programming remains an uncredentialed occupation - compare and contrast with medicine and the law for example - people without degrees deserve the right to be assessed on the quality of their actual work, and not a general prejudice on how they acquired the ability to do it. After all, the people who laid the foundations for computer science, necessarily didn't have a computer science degree.