The importance of college won't change until hiring practices do. Most employers don't actually test most of their candidates on their skills. Until they do they need a way to distinguish their candidates. Hiring from Harvard is a good way to do it since you can outsource your requirements to the Harvard acceptance department.
CS and engineering jobs must exist in a different universe than the rest of the working world. I have yet to go through an interview process that did not require a verbal/written series of technical questions being answered.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that they do. In many (most?) other professional fields decisions are made based solely on interviews, including finance, accounting, sales, middle management, etc.
Well at least in ECE/CS fields, we have the luxury of more liberal hiring practices in which personal projects on resumes and githubs can matter just as much as what school you went to if not more.
It's much harder to measure the quality of candidate in other fields without the context of what school they went to and how well they did there. (Unless, of course, you have time for a full-on interview. I think parent is referring to the screening process though)
