As an employer, I will offer a salary based on what you can actually do. If an applicant shows up claiming various skills, experience, degrees, etc and therefore demanding a salary they think is fair. I simply tell them that if they want the big bucks, they have to earn the big bucks. No company on earth makes profits from promises or degrees. They make money for actually doing something.
What I see as a problem is not lack of experience or a problem with education, it is laziness and unrealistic expectations on the part of the employees. This is not true of everyone, but where I live it is the dominant reality. The cold hard truth from the perspective of an employer (especially in small business), is that everyone has to carry double their own weight. If you are young you may struggle because you lack practical experience - you need to work harder to make up the gap. For the older engineers, they tend to spend too much time thinking that they have so much experience that they should get paid more money. What they need to do is take that experience and use it to accomplish more than anyone else instead of just talking about what they have done in the past. Companies do not make profits on what the engineering team in the past.
I have seen this laziness streak across the US from machinists, to EE, ME, assembly, finance, marketing, etc. In the real world, companies need bottom line results just to stay in business as we live in a global economy. I am competing with China daily and cannot afford to have ANY dead weight. This is why I fired the whole company and starting all over. The re-boot is focused on automation and other tools that reduce/eliminate the need for people as much as possible. Those that I do hire may or may not have degrees, but they will be expected to be smart and clever for the 8 hours they work. They also need to be someone that chose that job because they like it and have a personal interest in it. It is not good for small businesses to have the "I got this degree because I wanted a good job" applicants. That will work at big firms where the engineering tasks get sub-divided a thousand times before the entry-level engineers ever see it. Small to medium businesses switch gears often and fast. The whole team needs to be fast a nimble, but most important is never stop learning. Self-educate on a daily basis. Your degree is merely your first step that shows you have some initiative and you test well.
Be valuable. That is how you get a job that pays well. Your interview skills may get you an entry-level job, but you will go nowhere if you are not valuable. If you get demonstrate value during your interview, you may even start with a good salary.
Side note: I am a self-educated ME and EE that has built and sold numerous small businesses during the past 20+ years. If I don't know something, I learn it. If I run into a problem, I solve it. If I cannot figure it out, I ask. Super simple. I am not in the minority of business owners that expect work out their employees. Showing up is not working.