On /r/sysadmin and /r/itcareerquestions I have long been downvoted when I disagreed with the mantra of "just get a cert, college degrees are worthless". I do think that most valuable learning happens on the job and on your own. However, the job market is not always so hot for developers and IT, and like now it will have down turns. I always recommended younger people that even if they could get a job off of certs, they should strongly consider part time classes to get a degree.

While a lot of the IT jobs are cert and experience focused, more like a blue collar job. They are still in white collar companies, in offices, and play normal office politics. So eventually having a degree can be a filter to moving up, so its better to get one sooner rather than later.

The other side of this is what this person is facing. Operations jobs are becoming rarer than they used to be, and operations jobs that do not require coding are even rarer. Just having skills doing set ups is a lot less valuable if you can't script everything to happen automatically in a cloud environment.

At the end of the day you might be a good candidate, but on paper 5 years of experience vs 5 eyars of experience AND a degree, the degree wins.