I can assure you that our students (Holberton) do negotiate their entry-level jobs. The majority successfully do so :)
> the only things that matters is your study programme and your degree
When we started we had no track record whatsoever. Our first students found internships but also jobs everywhere including both completely unknown and super cool startup and very high-profile companies such as NASA, Apple etc... they were all selected on what they could do and not on a degree (we are not accredited) nor the school itself (we had no track record)
Today we atart to have a very good reputation so the problem is different, our atudents don't have to fight anymore, companies come to them. But for the first students it was very clear that ppl didn't care about degrees or "where do you come from".