>I'm not claiming that we were smarter, but by sheer coincidence, most people, even folks like me who skipped school, had very solid fundamentals.

Higher barrier of entry should statistically lead to less people making it past and that those who do make it past aren't a random sampling of the initial group making the attempt. While the selection isn't only for intelligence, specifically the subsets of intelligence related to programming, I would doubt any claims it wasn't a factor at all.