[heresyforme]

The best programmer I met in college quit after 2 semesters because he already knew the concepts.

However, aren't we really talking about IQ? From what I can remember, companies really started using degrees when testing for IQ became illegal. If a possible employee has an IQ of 120, then you can be pretty certain he's going to pick most of the concepts you throw at him. The college degree filters (beginning with the SAT, ACT, and high school diploma) a lot of low IQ people out the process (at least, in theory) and if not, it at least filters out those individuals who don't work hard improving their mental capacity (for instance, cognitive abilities may be improved through the study of music).

What an employer really needs is the ability to quickly filter out bad candidates. In reality, it is HR that does the culling. They don't know how to filter technical candidates, so the first thing they use is the college degree.