I believe your coworker is right to some extent. Getting a degree is a lot of work. It demonstrates your ability to do work and get things done.... Among other things.

Having any degree/post secondary diploma, generally says you have the ability to work on something without being forced into it. IMO, HS is generally expected and more or less forced on everyone, so it doesn't really count.

While I believe that's the motivation behind needing a degree to get a job, I also, personally, don't agree with it. There's plenty of hardworking people who never even considered college/uni after HS. Some of them are much more motivated and hardworking than the people I knew from my time in college.

I work in IT, and see degree requirements on all sorts of job postings. It's bullshit, since there's haven't been IT centric degrees until very recently, outside of CS/development. Most of these jobs don't require any programming whatsoever. They'll be for helpdesk, system administration, networking, etc. Programming knowhow might help but it's definitely not required. I don't need Java, or C++, or Python, or any other language to know how to click buttons on dialogs in Windows.