In the context of Software Development you can get into wherever you want if you have enough references, be it your contributions to open-source softwares, your past job experience etc.. pretty much everything that proves you can get stuff done and cause as few as trouble possible.
To understand my point throughly, you need to understand that most people -if not everybody- wants some form of determinism. Understand that the people who hires you has practially no way to know for sure how useful you will be to them, so the things you have done in the past has to stand for you. You can view a college degree simply as a reference that is supported by your college indicating that you know some things, which implies you are likely to perform better than the other Joe which doesn't have a degree.
A college degree is the safest, easiest and most reliable way to weigh a canditate's ability, though its not the perfect method, more importantly it is not "the" method.