I've been involved with hiring DBA's where I work for the last three years. It's been a frightful experience. We eliminate most candidates in a ten minute phone call. While I hate trivia tests, I think knowing the difference between a clustered and a non-clustered index or the difference between blocks, locsk and deadlocks are DBA 101 level stuff and not trivia. We knock out more people with those two questions. It's scary the lack of depth of knowledge in most of the candidates.

As to college degrees... It matters when the person has less than five years of experience in the industry. If they've been working for 5+ years and can demonstrate 5+ years of knowledge, who cares where or if they went to Podunk U and majored in underwater basket weaving. I have almost 20 years experience in IT now and I'm a college drop-out. I don't want a sheepskin, I want an experienced, knowledgeable human being.