I posit that the ability to self-learn outside of an academic setting correlates more strongly with being a valuable member of an engineering team than academic

I posit that the ability to self-learn outside of an academic setting correlates more strongly with being a valuable member of an engineering team than academic credentials. That reality muddies the conversation, as evidenced by the comments here: while a CS degree certainly gives you a head start, those with one but without good self-learning skills will not be valuable. On the other hand, non-CS-degree folks who get engineering jobs are independently very likely (not guaranteed, but likely) to have good self-learning skills. So we're not really comparing apples to apples. Rather, were comparing people who probably have high aptitude for a core component (self-learning) of software engineering with people who studied CS in school. Making it through a CS degree is, at most institutions, not nearly as strong a proxy for aptitude as breaking into the field because you possess a strong ability to teach yourself things. Note that none of this implies any negative things about people with CS degrees. If you don't have the academic background but can teach yourself things to "backfill" the missing knowledge, you can be a valuable engineer. The reverse is not true.