When I'm hiring for a startup, I look for someone who can do the job well. When I used to be hiring for a large multi-national, I was more interested in someone who could do the job and put up with a certain (large) amount of institutional bullshit.
A high GPA from a challenging school is a "signal" for just that very thing.
Part of what follows is edited from a WSJ column from 2007...
Most of us would agree that most professional jobs require a basic intellectual aptitude. And what has changed since the 1970s is that the court has developed a body of law that prevents employers from directly screening for such aptitude. The landmark case was Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). A black coal miner claimed discrimination because his employer required a high-school diploma and an intelligence test as prerequisites for promotion to a more skilled position. The court ruled 8-0 in the miner's favor. "Good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as 'built-in headwinds' for minority groups," Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote.
This became known as the "disparate impact" test, and it applies only in employment law. Colleges and universities remain free to use aptitude tests, and elite institutions in particular lean heavily on exams such as the SAT in deciding whom to admit. For a prospective employee, obtaining a college degree is a very expensive way of showing that he has, in effect, passed an IQ test.
But why are employers able to get away with requiring a degree without running afoul of Griggs? Because colleges and universities -- again, especially elite ones -- go out of their way to discriminate in favor of minorities. By admitting blacks and Hispanics with much lower SAT scores than their white and Asian classmates, purportedly in order to promote "diversity," these institutions launder the exam of its disparity.
Thus the higher-education industry and corporate employers have formed a symbiotic relationship in which the former profits by acting as the latter's gatekeeper and shield against civil-rights lawsuits. Little wonder that in 2003, when the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of discriminatory admissions policies at the University of Michigan, 65 Fortune 500 companies filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging that they be upheld.
What is happening now, though, is that now that everyone "needs" a degree to get a job - standards for entry, getting good grades and graduating are being lowered. And subsidies kick in (OP's article's point). There is even a push now to lower the standards for the bar exam. This is crucial because part of competition between legal degree programs is % of graduates able to pass that bar. With lowering the bar for entry and grades, the percentage drops. Which looks bad. Instead of fixing the problem, they are trying to fix the optics.
What I am worried about w/ any certification-only program is exactly this same phenomenon. The signal of the certificate and the truth of the certificate diverge as the bars are lowered. People stop treating it as a trustworthy signal.
Employers, reasonably, want people who can do the job or learn how to do the job. And there are a lot of candidates to work through. If you can't test them and if the degrees -- or certificates -- are worthless signals, then ... I don't know where we end up.