Did your instructors or TAs pair program with you? If so, what school were you at? I would consider it to be a very positive indicator of your program.
>We got feedback on every piece of code we ever wrote.
Sure, but asynchronous feedback on code certainly isn't something that can only be had at a university. Every bit of code I wrote while on the merchant engineering team at Groupon was reviewed by at least two people and the same is true of most my open source contributions.
>How many jobs are the YC companies contributing? I'm sure they're (mostly)all amazing places to work, but there's plenty of jobs you wont even be picked up from the pile of CVs if you haven't done a degree.
That may be true of many places, but at I can claim with certainty that FB and Google will both give interviews and even recruit engineers without CS degrees. It wouldn't surprise me if it were the least appealing jobs that most strictly adhere to credential-based hiring decisions.
FWIW, I used to run an HR effort at a tech start-up before I became an engineer myself, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with how they operate.