Dear Vice-Chancellors, congratulations on another year in the rankings. I'm writing from the other end of the pipeline, where your university graduates arrive, and very few of them can do the job.

I run a studio in Melbourne, and I help startups and small businesses hire for tech and marketing roles. So I read a lot of CVs with your name on them. I've stopped reading the degree line. I read the portfolio, the certificates, and the work someone has actually shipped.

My take on this? A degree tells me someone attended three or four years of lectures. It tells me nothing about whether they can do the work my clients pay for. A portfolio shows me that in five minutes.

What arrives at my door

I'm hardly alone. Australia's tech employers have an industry body, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA). Every year it surveys its member companies. Its State of the Nation 2024 survey asked how many graduates can do the job from day one. Members said just 1 per cent. A year earlier the figure was 3 per cent. The year before that, 5 per cent.

The rest need training. The AIIA's chief executive, Simon Bush, said members report six to nine months of it before a university graduate is productive. He also said what every small business owner already knows. A small business cannot carry an unproductive hire for that long.

Students pay you. Then employers pay to train them.

Which raises a question I'd genuinely like answered. What exactly are the fees for? The ceremony? The gown? The certificate in the nice frame? The part where someone learns to do the job happens in my clients' offices, six months after you've waved goodbye.

Companies build the new tools. Universities teach the old ones.

AI is changing every role I recruit for. Companies are building that AI, and universities are watching. Stanford University's 2026 AI Index found industry produced over 90 per cent of notable frontier AI models in 2025. Frontier models are the leading AI systems, the kind that sit behind tools like ChatGPT.

To be fair to you, universities still train researchers. The same report found new AI PhDs in the US and Canada rose 22 per cent from 2022 to 2024. That increase went into academia. So universities train researchers. Companies build the tools my clients actually use, and hire the people who can use them.

Your lecturers need retraining first. In my experience, too many of them have spent their whole careers inside the institution, teaching a job they have never done. Everyone can write a report. My clients need someone who can fix the problem the report is about.

Employers ask for degrees out of habit

So why do employers keep asking for degrees? Habit. Hiring managers tick the degree box because they always have. That habit is the main reason your graduates still get hired.

Big companies announced they would hire on skills. In practice, very little changed. Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute, a US labour market research group, studied this in 2024. They found that dropping degree requirements affected fewer than 1 in 700 hires in the US. That study is American. My guess is that Australia looks much the same, and I'm labelling it as a guess.

Here is what that means for you. Your graduates get past the first screen because employers ask for a degree. The day employers stop asking, that advantage is gone. Small businesses like my clients have already stopped. My prediction: big employers will stop too, once training graduates costs them enough.

The price tag is wobbling too. In the United States, several colleges are cutting their sticker prices by 40 per cent or more. Coe College in Iowa cut its tuition by about 45 per cent. According to the Wall Street Journal, every Coe student paid less than full price in 2023-24. So the advertised price was fiction. Carroll College in Montana, cutting its price by 40 per cent, said families had been ruling it out before they ever applied. The high price was meant to make the college look exclusive. It scared families away instead. Families are now checking what they get for their money. Universities should expect the same questions here.

Three things I'm asking for

Teachers who have done the job. Put practitioners in front of students: people who have run a campaign, shipped software or managed a budget. Pay them properly and let them teach part time alongside their real work.

Mark the portfolio. Assess students on work an employer can look at. A live website, a working app, a campaign with real results. That is what I check first when a CV lands.

Update courses at industry speed. The tools my clients use change every few months. If your course teaches last year's tools, your graduates arrive trained on the wrong tools, and employers retrain them.

And to every business owner reading this

Ask for the work first. Put "send us your portfolio" at the top of your next job ad, above any qualification. People who have done real work will send you links to it. You can shortlist on what they have actually made, before you spend an hour interviewing anyone.

Pay for a test task. A short, paid piece of real work shows you how someone thinks, writes and delivers. Paying for it is fair, and it attracts people who take the job seriously.

Treat certificates as supporting evidence. Courses from Google, Microsoft or Amazon Web Services show someone put in the hours and kept learning. The portfolio shows they can do the job. Hire on the portfolio first.

Your graduates paid you to teach them. Now businesses pay me to train them.