IME people who learned the theory can adapt to new situations much better. Those that just learned a single set of skills like, say, Python web backends become lost quickly if they need to do something different, like optimise some multithreaded C++ service. And often in our jobs these types of things do come up, you can’t always get a specialist to cover every single type of work.

Of course this could be mostly correlation, perhaps the type of people that seek degrees also enjoy learning more broadly in general.