I dropped out of school around the .com bubble bust, for ill-considered reasons that I won't go into, and instead spent quite a lot of time and energy continuing to develop technical chops on my own. That part is only relevant to frame the next:
In 2008, amid the downturn cited in this thread as a similar inflection point to the one we see today, I landed my first SE job, after a few months of active searching. They hired me without a degree and without any formal experience. I had a small portfolio of example work, the technical knowledge that I'd developed, and my personal philosophy. The portfolio did little to help me. The technical knowledge served to barely avoid outright disqualification. It was my outlook that earned me a chance to show mettle.
This was local startup that was a half-dozen years old. There I learned what technical collaboration was like in practice, what it meant to build as part of a team. I learned the stuff that school and individual hacking doesn't teach. In a couple of years I moved on to a Fortune 100 company on a merger mission, and from there on to greener pastures in the industry. Now I earn comfortably, somewhere north of 90th percentile by geography. Each of those steps, along with a healthy dose of reading, taught me something that I needed to learn/understand about the craft and it's challenges. I was oblivious to the need to know most of them until after I wrestled with them.
One of the most important lessons, and one very relevant today: character traits, not merely technical learning, lend power to carving a successful path.
You are not nearly as likely to differentiate yourself by degree alone as was the case in the past. Even less so if people sense entitlement. That's not a judgement, but a caution.
Hiring right now looks like an absolute swarm of posers, far noisier than I've ever seen before, fighting to convince managers to hire them into senior salaries. They are empowered by magical answer generators that whisper secret sauces into their ears just in time to be vomited back and the interviewer. Even though some of them vomit better than others, the kind of manager that you want to work for (imo) is going to see right through those people - and is getting very tired of it.
So tired in fact that I'm ready to hire low/no-experience, high-character people into my senior slots if they show that they have passion for the craft and ethics to match it. I won't pay them a fortune out the gate, but I will match salary growth to competency growth once they are in the saddle.
Time is the fabled commodity, and there's a lot of time-waste going on at the moment.
My advice, if you're having trouble on initial approach: be humble, be curious, and show an honest + direct character - be comfortable in the knowledge that the new skill is not what you already know, but how well your outlook positions you to "leaRn into" the next curve. And then, don't stop carving.