[crowdpleaser]

Degrees themselves may not have much value, but the value of the degree is that employers can use them to offload discrimination to schools.

Through disparate impact legislation and jurisprudence, employers can only consider job applicants on narrow grounds. Schools have much more leeway to admit/deny admission.

An employer would probably get sued for using IQ tests because blacks and hispanics tend to do poorly on those tests. However, the ACT and SAT are highly correlated with IQ and schools can and do use those to make admission decisions. An employer that wants to filter for smart people would be well-advised to hire from schools that only accept cognitively gifted students.

You can't refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't speak well, but you can refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't hold a degree from an institution that refused to admit Jamal because he didn't get a high enough score in the English section of the ACT/SAT.

[carnagii]

Harsh but true. Requiring advanced math classes as a gatekeeper for comp Sci is also massively exclusionary and totally pointless because the vast majority of programming jobs require no math at all.