Access to entry level positions is pretty fucked up in this because whilst experts will recognized expertise, for anything but smaller companies candidates get filtered out by HR and those people have no fucking clue what expertise outside their domain looks like, so they use proxies for it such as "stamp of approval from higher education institution" so in big companies the candidates without such stamps of approval (or a pre-existing insider contact) never actually get to be evaluated by the domain experts who can recognize that expertise.

That said, if a candidate doesn't have at least some domain expertise (so, neither formal study nor having done anything in that area in their free time), sorry but somebody who has actually had the discipline to attend a learning institution and enough capability and domain knowledge to actually pass their exams and graduate, is way more likely to be at least decent at it (no guarantee, but the odds are much better) than a random person who never did either. It's only fair that if you haven't invested in learning it in some way or other (not necessarily college) you're not going be seen at the same level as somebody who has actually invested in learning that domain.

It's only naturally that some kind of expertise validation system for candidates emerges for any kind of domain were some level of expertise is required and as things stand now in most such domains at the entry level that's colleges (which, IMHO, are better than cronyism-heavy "know somebody who knows somebody" systems), though in many domains something lighter and cheaper (some kind of cheaper test-only option) would probably be better (or, alternativelly, do as it's done in civilized countries and have higher education be Public, thus cheaper or even free).