While not universally true, there are some geographic locations in the US that make that feel true.
The town I grew up in had 4 major tech employers.
- A weird segment of Department of Defense contractors that developed "mission simulators" (AKA first-person shooters) for the Army
- A banking umbrella company
- An insurance company
- A credit card payments processor
The state university in the same town had a Computer Science degree and offered a Bachelor's of Science with three different tracks/specializations:
- Games Programming: Focused on learning how to write 3D game engines. You learned C++, OpenGL, a bit of DirectX, a lot of Client/Server stuff like writing your own protocols on top of IP and UDP, and so on.
- Systems Programming: Dig into multi-threaded programming, write parsers as a way of learning how programming languages work, and magically segue into COBOL, IBM HLASM, DB2's unique takes on SQL, etc.
- Web Programming: JavaScript, ASP.NET, Windows IIS, Oracle.
Guess what those four employers filtered every candidate on?
Either 5+ years prior work experience littered with every keyword on the job description or a degree. There was literally zero way for someone without prior experience to get a degree, and because this wasn't Big Tech City X, even with 5+ years you pulled $65,000 tops.
Basically, the whole life cycle worked like this:
1) Tempt new students with cheaper CS degree compared to nationally famous college two hours away.
2) Use CS degree to snowflake their skills into a perfect match for a job with local employers.
3) Continuously have local employers show up on campus and talk up how cheap the Cost of Living is in small military town. Show hand-wavey "$65,000 here is the same as making $200,000 in San Francisco!" Neglect to explain how Social Security and Pensions/401ks work.
4) Convince students to "just get a few years under your belt" then go to Big Tech City with actual work experience.
5) Further pigeon hole skills and provide zero continuous learning, training, certification, or other ways of expanding employee's skill set, making it hard for them to find jobs in Big Tech City.
6) Profit by never paying anyone more than $80,000 to write software.
7) Avoid employing demographic profiles that are less likely to have kids. Grow your employee culture around "setting down roots". Profit even more by having almost perfect retention if you lump all four major employers together and colluding to maintain low wages.
"the only way..." usually is a made-up fact designed to fit a circumstance.