Some employers no longer require university degrees and instead focus on skills and experience. Is this a positive or negative development?

In recent years, a growing number of companies have dropped the requirement for a university degree and now hire based on demonstrated skills and practical experience. I believe this is largely a positive development, although it carries certain risks that should be acknowledged. The clearest benefit is fairness. University education is expensive, and talented people from poorer families are often excluded from good careers simply because they could not afford a degree. When employers assess coding tests, portfolios or work history instead of certificates, they open doors for capable candidates regardless of background. Companies benefit as well, because they select people who can actually perform the job rather than those who merely studied near it. Furthermore, this shift encourages continuous learning. Skills-based hiring rewards people who keep their abilities current through online courses and real projects, which suits fast-changing industries such as technology far better than a qualification earned a decade ago. Nevertheless, there are drawbacks. Some professions, such as medicine or engineering, genuinely require the deep theoretical grounding a degree provides, and weakening that expectation could endanger the public. There is also a risk that unstructured hiring becomes subjective, allowing bias to creep in where transcripts once provided an objective baseline. In conclusion, moving from degrees to demonstrated skills widens opportunity and matches the pace of the modern economy, so I consider it a positive trend overall — provided that safety-critical fields keep their formal requirements and employers use structured, fair methods to measure ability.