Nowadays a lot of companies are hiring new grads through their internship pipeline only. So to be able to break into the industry you have to start looking for jobs in your ~sophomore year of college and hope to keep getting return offers.
I wish high schools taught this more. If you do 3 internships in college, you'll likely (if you didn't sleep through them) have at least 1, if not 2 job offers when you graduate. Plus some actual job references, and three years of "work experience".
I graduated with a BS+MS in '04, and my school (Kent State) had basically no CS internship program when I was there. There was something like 1 internship opportunity per summer for the entire department, which is just absurd. I lucked into a few campus jobs even as I was in high school where I got to do some real sysadmin / webmaster work along with some custom web dev stuff that gave me the chance to actually collect some requirements and build real systems for users, and see what their problems were. I'm sure I'd cringe to see the ecommerce site I built back in 1999 for a friend of the family!
Had I not had these opportunities, with no internship I probably would have been in much worse shape going into the job market 20 years ago. Today I can't even comprehend how screwed a newgrad with zero experience outside the classroom might be.
