I know, this all sounds airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky, but it's largely true. Many employers are still going to be impressed more with hustle than with degrees on paper. The ones that aren't - perhaps you don't want to work there anyway.
The world is very much who-you-know vs what-you-know, and getting out there networking with people is going to get you a better chance of work than fighting with 9 other degree-holding applicants filling out forms on monster.com.
The real problem here is that you have half a generation 18-22 year-olds coming of age, trying to leave their parents' care, and finding that there's basically no demand for their labor.
Millions of people can't all have more hustle, moxie, initiative, mojo, or whatever other nigh-meaningless abstract term we've chosen to convey "the capitalistic equivalent of sex-appeal", than each other. There has to be actual demand for labor to hire these people.
Conversely, even though I'm not average, an overall bad labor market affects me. The tech sector is "recession-proof", but nothing is Great Depression proof. An ultra-capitalist economy geared towards maximizing debts and rents for bankers, lobbyists and lawyers does, in fact, ripple out to the tech sector and affect hiring. For instance, it means that there are very few R&D labs in computing right now (though a friend of mine has been interviewing with R&D teams at Oracle and I'll be happy to have the connection!), lots of VC-funded start-ups, and much of the world's top technical and scientific talent ends up writing financial algorithms. Someone who wants to actually do hard-core technology like me finds himself really curiously starved for places to work, given how well the tech-sector is supposedly doing. Oh, and everyone is wondering when this latest start-up bubble will pop, especially after GroupOn, Facebook, and Zynga IPOs.
