I'm guessing he's implying that "white collar" programmers have a degree in Computer Science that is heavy in theory (as opposed to being primarily vocational, like, say, the University of Phoenix). Most such curricula will include at least one class that focuses on functional programming. (UC Berkeley teaches their 101 CS class using Scheme!)

The people who care about this distinction are the sort of people who give job interviews where they ask you to implement a balanced binary search tree on the whiteboard and then grill you on the order of growth of each function that you wrote. :-)