This was true 50 years ago but hasn't been true since the 90's or so. France may well be the exception in this, but then again, France is an exception in many ways.
In France, from what I know there is a fairly strong culture of secondary education that creates an 'in-group', not unlike what you see in the UK or the USA with their top-tier universities, and you are either 'on the plan' or you won't be able to get in unless you are of exceptional abilities and that rarely happens later in life, so I think that alone is sufficient to explain the discrepancy.
In NL you can enroll in higher education basically whenever you want, quota permitting and with the intense competition for such spots from abroad by very qualified young people this too can be tricky, depending on the field. But in NL a university degree isn't a pre-requisite for many jobs outside of academia (and teaching) itself.
Anything to do with technology tends to be more merit based, and achievement there tends to trump formal education, and by the time you are 40+ that formal education tends to be weighted far less than when you are say 25 and just out of school.
Other countries would add more to the pattern of variability, there is a huge difference between say Poland or Romania or the Nordics or the Baltics, further reflected in the weight that which a diploma or degree from such institution would carry, especially abroad. For instance, right now in the Baltics there is something of a brain drain happening with the younger generation moving West in droves and so as an older person it is stupidly easy to enroll in a university program. But that degree isn't going to help you much unless you remain in the local economy and the degrees from a decade or more ago are given more weight than the ones that you get there right now because they are fairly desperate for students just to keep the departments up and running.
The first tiers are more targetted towards craftsmanship (e.g. arithmetic and trigonometry you can quickly do in your head, you start working earlier in life, as early as 16) while the latter tiers are more universal and abstract (e.g. math concepts that have better use for computer science, you start working much later, around 25 years old).
You can switch between tiers or fetch later.
I know that here in Quebec, you can enroll in university no matter what as long as you are 21 years old and finished high school. Does that happen in Germany? Or is it rare to actually be able to switch between "paths"?
