Agreed. But OP's point of neurosurgeons and lawyers needing to finish college whereas programmers don't need to is interesting. Using the IQ argument, one could say that even neurosurgeons don't need to finish med school.

The fundamental difference I believe is that because the Internet is so new(relatively) and ever changing that you don't need experience to build software.In fact,experience may hold you back at times. Also,most of the software is not critical. Someone's life doesn't depend on it. However, human bodies and laws remain fairly stable and can affect life/death and thus,experience matters. You can't trust a college dropout to become a great neuro-surgeon without having performed several surgeries even if their IQ is in the top 0.01 percentile.