I'm quite firmly against anti-intellectualism. Otherwise I think I'd then have to be anti myself!
In interviews, and across my 25 year career, I've met some excellent degree holders who brought some great skills to proceedings and a roughly similar number of excellent developers who didn't have the paper.
I've also come across occasional degree holders who I'd barely trust to make coffee let alone put near code.
In short, people are people.
Similar to other commenters I've found no correlation between degree on CV and later ability in employment, or it to be a useful indicator for prospective employees. In consequence I do find requiring a degree for applications silly.
Having a degree doesn't guarantee that you're automatically better than anyone without one, there will be good and bad people on both sides. People that don't take the traditional education route will generally be self studying through private courses or just reading lots and lots of books. It takes a lot of drive, determination and study skills to do it on your own too. Additionally many of them may have been able to break into the job market early, so they'll have years of real world experience and learning from peers by the time they would have usually finished their degree.
I think it's more many people vastly underestimate just how much they and others got out of their education.
Sure,everything is a bell curve, but spending the majority of your time thinking of little else beyond software concepts for 4ish years will fundamentally change how you think and reason.
There are genuine questions surrounding how valuable CS degrees are (or should try to be) for professional software development careers. It has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.
In some cases it's garbage in, garbage out. They may have been terrible going into university and came out a little bit better. They scrape by barely passing and come out with a degree that is just as valuable as the person standing next to them with natural ability, drive, and passion who excelled through school. After all half the graduates are below average.
- You've bought into the anti-intellectualism wave that's going on in the US.
- The universities near you are really poor.
Is it really the case that you learn so little on these universities that you literally have no advantage over those who didn't attend?