If we're talking about programming having a college degree helps better ensure that the candidate has had good exposure to relevant theory (e.g. automata, graph, ...) and math. While understanding this stuff isn't essential for most CRUD apps, it's crucial if you're building something big like a new kind of datastore, a better search engine, an operating system, and so on. Yes someone without a degree can theoretically have an understanding of subjects that most people only have exposure to in a university, however if you're a company that plays things safe you're going to go for the better bet