The college degree has become the new high school degree

This is more-or-less the result of the "everybody should go to college" public policy of the past few decades. Degree inflation is the natural consequence.

Degrees are used (rightly or wrongly) by employers as signifiers of where the candidate lies in the normal distribution of potential employees. Pushing more people into college does not fundamentally change the shape of this distribution, it merely inflates the credentials required to find the top X percentile.