A pool of statistical outliers is not a "big pool" that the parent comment was referring too. There are quite a few brilliant software engineers I got a chance to work with who had no college education whatsoever, but they are very clearly outliers among very few. I strongly doubt there is some big untapped pool of engineers without degrees who are just being completely overlooked simply for not having a degree.

How could we use Newton's flaming laser sword to settle our argument?