Universally accepted, I agree. But wonder why? Is it because it has always been this way? If you had two prospects show up for your hands on job opening....one with 8 years of experience and one with a freshly minted degree in ME, but has never seen the inside of a manufacturing plant (just throwing a dart at the wall), I wonder which one we'd consider? While my degree is not in engineering, I think it's also universally accepted that your education starts the day that you graduate. On that note, I would consider 8 years of experience to have a serious jump.
In general, HR departments operate on a serious CYA basis..... Especially at bigger companies, and that doesn't mean very large, necessarily.
What that means is that given the choice of a person with a "real" degree (i.e. "qualified"), vs a person with some sort of "certification", they usually almost HAVE TO choose the degree, "because nobody can argue about that, the applicant was qualified" if the person doesn't work out. Hire an "unqualified" person, and you maybe answering some not very nice questions from an upper executive, later. There is even a liability aspect to this in certain cases.
Experience also varies.... there is 8 years experience, and one year experience, repeated 8 times. It can be hard to tell the difference in an interview. The "qualified" individual is safer.
Then also, if teh EEOC comes in, you may find that you cannot put an experienced person without the education, in some salaried positions, because of the exempt rules on non-overtime eligible..... At the old company, we had to switch to paying some people hourly, because they were not educated up to their job level... (we had the EEOC in due to firing the "employee from hell", who called everybody down to the local dogcatcher as revenge for being fired)
There's more, but that is a start.