I don't think the education barrier fully accounts for SWE salaries. It takes a particular disposition and other hard things, learned over years of doing, to actually keep do software engineering as a career.
AI changes the dispositions and difficulties, but it still favors a narrow selection of people to do the (still) difficult task of software engineering with agents.
AI changes the dispositions and difficulties, but it still favors a narrow selection of people to do the (still) difficult task of software engineering with agents.