It doesn't seem to matter if someone went to university. I have had to unpick crap code from uni grads and self taught. Experience may be the only true reliable tell, and I don't mean jobs held I mean world experience on projects.
There are also different types of self taught, and different types of uni grad. You have people who love code, have a passion for learning, and that's driven them to gain a lot of experience. Then you have those who needed to make a living, and haven't really stretched beyond their wheelhouse so lack a lot of diverse experience. Both are totally fine and capable of some work, but you would have better luck with novel work from an experienced passionate coder. Uni trained or not.
> but you would have better luck with novel work from an experienced passionate coder. Uni trained or not.
I have not learned CS at university (maths & stats graduate who shifted to programming, because I can't help myself loving it). I work with engineers with CS degrees from pretty good universities. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I write better code then a lot of them (and some of them write code that it so clean and tight that I wish I could match it). Purely based on my fairly considerable experience, there is basically little correlation between degree and quality of code. There is non-trivial correlation between raw intelligence and the output. And there is a massive correlation between how much one cares about the quality of the work and the output.