The list includes high-paying tech outlets like Apple, Google, and IBM, in addition to service-oriented companies like Costco, Starbucks, and Chipotle.

"Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door," Maggie Stilwell, Ernst and Young's managing partner for talent, told the Huffington Post when that company dropped the requirement.

In other words: Companies will hire the candidates whose experience and skills best suit them for the job. Many of those successful applicants will have university degrees. Some of them will not.

At IBM, where roughly 15% of new hires in the US don't have college degrees, CEO Ginni Rometty has said that vocational courses and on-the-job experience offer more relevant training for many tech sector positions than a four-year college degree.

It's not that college degrees are useless. For many people, university is the place where they acquire skills employers value. But automatically discounting people who earn that same knowledge through a different path can be counterproductive.

Which hypothetical resume offers a more convincing case for a candidate's work ethic or motivation: one from a recent college graduate who majored in computer science, or that of a self-taught coder who acquired those same skills while also managing full-time employment? What a person knows is more important than how they learned it.