But I've met plenty of people who come out of uni with a CS degree and don't know squat. I totally get the distinction, and there needs to be a distinction between someone playing around, someone who is a junior and someone who is truly brilliant. But it doesn't require a degree to reach that top level.
I only took some CS modules at uni, I learnt everything I know either on the job or off my own back, including OOP, JavaScript/OOJS, advanced HTML and CSS. They didn't teach you the difference between browsers either (I started back in IE4/Netscape days).
What this guys daughter decides that at 18 years old (and now having programmed for 10 years) it's not worth going to uni because a) it'll cost too much and b) might as well get a 4 year head start over everyone else. So by that time she'll have 14 years experience. I think that would count for a hell of a lot more than a formal education. There's nothing magical about programming that a google search will not reveal.
