> Part of this is because of how available education is, so virtually everyone who’s applying for a tech job comes with some sort of academic education, meaning that they’ve proven their worth to get it.

I interviewed hundreds of people in my career, 95%+ had university degrees, and in my experience, this is a much weaker signal than you make it. Only consistent takeaway I have is people with CS degrees from elite schools are unlikely to be completely terrible, but not much beyond that: the people with these elite degrees didn’t even necessarily pass coding/algorithm interviews, and people with less elite degrees would pass or fail with no additional signal from the degree. I’ve seen many, many people with CS degrees fail at things that I wouldn’t expect someone who passed an intro programming class to fail, things like keeping track of running maximum and an index of element at which the maximum occurs.