I would site expense as the main reason.
As for jobs, that's hard to say. Most of the major corporations yes mostly want people with degrees. That said, everybody can find a niche and a job they can at least live on. That said its much harder doing it from a position of "outsider". What you need to do is marry a local, which gives you resident status. Having said that, you can live in The Netherlands I think after 6 months as a resident. You can watch the show "In From Holland" online or on Mhz Networks (PBS-World) and the host is an African-American from Virginia who is looking to become a permanent resident and knows Dutch to fluency.
The key is to become a resident then you can put the local Government to work for you looking for a job. I'm not sure if this is the case for all the EU countries but some will provide you with job help regardless. There isn't much mentioned of Americans on much of the immigration pages for the EU, they mostly talk about coming from countries without free movement or from other member nations.
Unemployment isn't as big a problem in much of the EU because they have gone to other schemes to keep people employed, yet save money. In fact in Germany there's a program where some employers have reduced some of their hourly staff to part-time status and the Government picks up the rest.
You don't need a degree, it helps however. But nobody needs ANYTHING but food, clothes and water. Everything else is optional and how well you think outside the box. As I have said before. I got the idea of going after IT after reading a story about a former Nam vet who married a German Woman, moved to the States, couldn't find any work and decided to return to Germany around the time of Watergate. He worked as a warehouse/lift truck driver for about 20 years but then moved into computers all Microsoft certifications. I recently checked and he used to work for the German Parks District but now he works for a private company maintaining their servers/network.
I did this to so I can have viable, verifiable job skill to take with me to Europe. I'm pretty much set on spending my children's formative years in either Germany or Belgium with both have International Schools.
I don't know about this American Mystic being lost. The fact is, we bombed our future economic competition into submission (Europe and Japan), dominated in the 1950's and 1960's, but then The Owners didn't like the social discourse and tried to clamp down on it and were largely successful. So with the election of Nixon they started to roll back the New Deal, which puts us where we are today.
Americans have to compete on merit like everybody else and this is where both decisions by students (
http://www.martynemko.com/articles/we-s ... ege_id1543) and parents/guardians have put maybe too many people in the college system and not trained enough high skilled labor. The economy of tomorrow will not be people stocking and boxing things, it will be people understanding electronics and complex systems. Much of what happens in warehouses and assembly of products can be done by machine. When the rate of employing people meets with the cost of automation, mass unemployment will happen. This the Elephant in the room when you talk about classic employment which is putting people to work making things as what the future will demand which is the maintenance of systems and services.
Considering how many people took the first 9 weeks and the second 9 weeks of my A+ class tells me that there still is room for people to want to pursue this. Most of the people in my class are not going anywhere and a majority of them will never enter the job market with just a A+. They'll likely have to get additional certifications (Network +) and they'll all work locally, not overseas.
I'm the only one with any desire to work overseas (that I know of) and frankly this is the mindset of most Americans. What I have to do is match the qualifications of the average EU applicant.
Based on things I have seen, I just have to move up the experience and certification scale and learn additional task like using Virtual Machines. I am going to purchase a Windows Home Server for myself and maybe build another one for Windows Server 2011 and Ubuntu Server. Once I gain some experience likely working locally for min pay, I will then use that to apply overseas with companies like DHL for example.
Anyway just my .02
