I'm going to ding this ... hard.
First and most importantly: some students I knew were trying to accelerate their path through college. They didn't want to rack up huge loans and wanted out ASAP to start making money. This group included both right out of high school as well as returning non-traditional students. They simply didn't have time for employment. And, with Covid, I suspect that this cohort is going to have a big boost.
Second: some students are helping take care of their family and going to college is enough of a time struggle. You are knocking this group out--and my experience suggests that a lot of them are female. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a good example from this class.
Third: personally, my experience suggests that those working "food service" jobs, specifically, are sub par. This applies only to that group and not other "customer service" roles (like retail sales). "Food service" is a time consuming job with weak wages and unstable hours dealing with a psychologically draining public cohort. Anyone with a brain wired for programming wants out of that kind of job post haste and has some level of skill to do so.
However, even then, I try not to let prior experience color my perceptions of junior engineers and programmers.
Junior engineers need to be "teachable" more than anything else. Generally, what I look for is what they absorbed from one of their teachers that isn't in the book.
Good teachers are always giving off a bag of pearls of wisdom beyond the scope of the class. Students in my classes got exposed to automated testing, source control, and an IDE. Often I'd give out epigrams of wisdom "70% of the time use a hash table; 30% of the time use a vector; 0.01% of the time ask somebody what you should be using instead when those don't work."
Good programmers and engineers latch onto something out of that bag because they find it interesting. That's what you're looking for in an interview as it signifies they can be taught and actually want to do this. I find this is probably more important even than absolute GPA.
> I don’t even ask leetcode questions, and only a minority of folks can answer them (and I allow them to look up reference material online).
Sadly, this does seem to be true for the majority of junior folks. They just can't code. I don't really know how you get out of a degree program without that, but they somehow do.
I suspect this is the simple reason why so many companies just go after the "elite" schools--you can't escape from those programs without having at least a minimum level of competence at coding.