Perhaps your experience varied with zip code, but in the area where I lived at the time, the perception was that software industry was in a decline and acquiring a degree in the field seemed like a dubious bet. Maybe the sentiment was different if you were in the Bay area.
The dot-com bubble/crash had just happened and a lot of non-tech folks thought it would never come back. I remember telling my uncle I was going to intern at Amazon around 2005/6 and him asking me in all seriousness, "aren't they bankrupt?"
