Tech companies could hire and train students straight from high school instead of making them go through the academic priestly class, but nope, everyone wants expensive degrees and pay more for it.
If Google did that, then Google would also be to blame for the resulting demographics not meeting everyone's standards for equality. It's really useful to be able to outsource some of the filtering process.
Agreed. Any company that can pay six figure salaries for graduate wants to be able to choose a combination of outstanding smarts and grit. Getting into an Ivy League CS program demonstrates that - and any demographic issues are provably due to the pipeline.
Exchanging that filter for hiring straight out of school but only taking, say, people with top 5% of SAT results (1420) would also demonstrate it, but it would result in even more stark over-representation of Asians (about 20% of them meet the cutoff) and under-representation of Blacks (only 1% of them meet the cutoff).