- one guy I interviewed for a junior position had put his CV and projects online on his own website. It wasn't loads but he was the only one out of that bunch of grad inverviewees to do it. I had a look through it before his interview, and when he came in I said, "that HTML looks remarkably clean! Did you tidy all that up just before you posted for the job?" We both laughed because it was obvious he had. Rest of the interview was nice and easy after establishing the "we are developer friends" bit.
- one guy had no degree, no A levels to speak of, but his contribution to open source was immense. We got him in for interview and he could speak clearly and with authority on each of the huge projects he was involved in. We offered him the job but he refused us to go somewhere bigger.
So go get yourself a GitHub account, buy a domain name for very little/year, point it at a GitHub Page and put anything you can think of on there. Congrats, you are now better than 90% of candidates out there.
In my experience, development experience is relatively easy for students to obtain while in school. Internships are abundant (obviously not everyone is going to come out of school having worked for Google or Microsoft but most people who want to get development experience during college can find it). Personal projects are another way of doing something "useful" that have effectively zero barrier to entry.
It isn't too hard to do something "useful" as developer in college, if one has the motivation...
You'd have to ask them why.