In defence of pointless degrees
I saw this week that the Spectator magazine is due to hold a public debate in March with the provocative title: “A Liberal Arts Education is a Waste of Time and Money.” Featuring contributions on both sides of the argument from such luminaries as Katie Hopkins, Will Self and Harry Cole, the event’s aim is to ponder whether at a time when a degree is expensive and no longer a guarantee of employment, it might be more sensible for would-be humanities students to undertake vocational study instead.
Thankfully, the organisers have clearly opted for a discussion that leans more towards entertaining knockabout than academic rigour. Contributions to this well-trodden, polarised and probably unresolvable dispute can be rather wearisome: remember when Sir James Dyson claimed that Britain’s slide towards “third world” status is attributable to its young choosing to study “French lesbian poetry”? It prompted some amusing retorts that the fearless elder statesman of the vacuum cleaner industry was “clueless and well as bagless”, in addition to provoking an unexpected intervention from Education Secretary Michael Gove in support of the lefty liberal arts viewpoint.
Last July, an Oxford University Study looking at the impact of humanities on the UK economy showed that at the peak of the last economic boom, about 20% of humanities graduates were working in growth-driving sectors such as financial services and management. Professor Shearer West, head of humanities at the dreaming spires told the Financial Times that her report demonstrated arts graduates had proven “highly responsive to national economic needs” and employers were “desperate” for candidates with succinct communication skills and a capacity for critical analysis.
Maybe co-founder and one-time CEO of PayPal Peter Thiel (Philosophy), IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde (English and Law) and London Mayor Boris Johnson (Classics) also benefitted from educations that encouraged creative impulses, lateral thinking and the self-driven accumulation of knowledge as a good in itself. And outside the worlds of business, finance and politics, what about the UK’s “world class” – quote attributed to Chancellor George Osborne (Modern History) – creative industries? The Department of Culture, Media and Sport reported in January 2014 that jobs in these sectors grew by 8.6% in 2011-12, vastly outstripping the UK economy as a whole.
Ultimately, the obvious and unexciting reality of this debate is that neither side is right; every well-balanced economy needs universities to a teach varied mixture of knowledge and skills if it is to recruit engineers, finance chiefs, vacuum cleaner designers and poets in the right quantities.