According to Kevin, you portfolio students and recent grads are the Maker Generation. When Kevin or I were looking for our first jobs, if we wanted to pull something real together, we would have had to find a typesetter, a photographer, maybe a sound engineer. Nothing got produced that didn't involve a team.
But today, people are producing work all the time with nothing more than a great idea and maybe a little tech shrewdness. I go to portfolio school reviews each year and more and more, there are students developing their own apps, fonts, websites, radio programs. It's not just theory.
Kevin said this democratization of maker-iness means there's no reason any portfolio school grad should go into a job interview where the person interviewing hasn't already heard of them.
That's a pretty high bar. Thing is, there are plenty of examples out there where portfolio school students (your competition) are already clearing it.