And why should companies have their HR departments thoroughly vet candidates when they can rely on the college admissions process to do it for them?

Free vetting AND loyal slave... uh... I mean... employees! Who could say no to that!?

I would much rather hire someone who didn't finish college but has had five years of progressive responsibility in the right area, than someone who had just finished a four or five year degree course but had never worked.

I think you can tease out three possible factors influencing the situation here:

- more people graduating, more supply, means that even entry-level jobs are flooded with college graduates - entry-level jobs in decline, either due to automation or companies just not interested in providing apprenticeships - student loans shifting the power dynamics between employer/employee; you're more pressed to get a job, any job, so you're more likely to take up positions where you're overqualified and underpaid

These scenarios all form positive feedback loops to each other; with more high-skilled worker supply in the market, companies can grow their non-entry level jobs while automating the low-level ones; this reduction in entry jobs means that the desperate college students compete more fiercely with high school students, raising the bar for entry level jobs; the raised bar for entry level jobs forces more high school students to go into college rather than start work, which saddles them with student debt, feeding into the cycle.

I've noticed that many social situations tend to end up in such vicious, entangled circles. My dad used to call these the "downward spiral of failure" and the "upward spiral of success", and I really don't know how you transition from one to the other without a monumental effort or some kind of miracle breakthrough.

Also, your crosswise comparison between an experienced candidate without a degree and an inexperienced candidate with a degree only tells me that you put more weight into experience than having a degree. It really doesn't tell me much about whether a degree is a good signal, but only that it's worse than experience. Now, if you had told me that you don't consider whether a candidate has a degree at all then I'd be able to infer that they are terrible signals and carry no information at all.

You've got a space of time in a person's life between, presumably, graduating high school and sending you a resume. What did they do with that time?

Merely having a degree doesn't say much.

Merely not having a degree doesn't say much.

Having an honors BS in CS from CMU, MIT, Stanford, or a bunch of other schools implies academic competence and exposure to a certain range of ideas. But I don't know that they can be productive outside of that environment.

Having an ordinary BS in a STEM subject from a random college that I've never heard of means even less to me. But is it zero? No.

Holding down a job for those four years is a signal, too, and it needs evaluation. What kind of job? While living at home? Did anything progress during that time? Is it relevant to what we're trying to hire for?

A proxy for an IQ test?