I disagree on this. I've interviewed loads of people for IT jobs, and the one's with degrees generally aren't any better than your common bedroom geek.
True, but these days lots of companies emphasize on team environment work experience also. The average bedroom geek just doesn't work well with others(even those who get their degrees online are often question for reliability). We have several at my job place and while the guys are extremely adapt at doing their coding work, they just simple are horrible with working in a structure team (some of theses guy were hired during the dot-com boom straight from highschool) :
1 - they don't seem to want to accept authority of project managers or suggestions from other developers
2 - communication is almost non existent with any of them
3 - they don't even work well together
4 - they tend to break off from specific coding standards that the company uses (they often code in a way that only they understand...or rather makes it hard for other developers to work with)
So these guys are often given the tasks of updating and modifying code in existing older (and I mean VB, ASP era) apps, while the rest of the developers get to do all the newer more advance stuff on the team. Needless to say, no more "bed room" or highschool degree-only folks were hired.
I know several people who can't event get a job with their high-priced degrees and technical certifications because they simply won't accept anything but an enormous amount of money
I do too. They did however eventually settled for something less than what they expected. The problem with that is that schools are putting the idea in the heads of these IT students that they are worth tons of money out in the real world when the actual truth is...they're probably not. BUT however, having those high priced degrees did eventually get them a very comfortable salary job - but thats after getting their foot into the IT industry first. Thats the hard part....