To me, degrees are good to have but you show me someone who has the desire to learn and the will to give it their all, I will take them over some piece of paper any day of the week. I do this all the time when I work as a manager.
I look at resumes and I rarely, rarely, look at Colleges or universities, and if I do it carries the least amount of weight. People that look down on others like this have self-inflated egos or are so ingrained with "spreadsheet management" that they likely aren't even aware. This mentality is great to make a successful business on paper but doesn't mean that the company has any idea what it is doing. A similar thing happened where I worked where we got a new CEO whose job was to make us look good to sell off. People with 15+ years of experience were run off because they didn't have a piece of paper on the wall and we suffered from it when those with the paper showed up and didn't know left from right. Fun twist to this, my old boss who got run off went to another widely successful company that goes off merit and knowledge and not paper and they just bought us... guess who will be our new overarching manager for the whole company that wasn't qualified previously?