My eldest daughter called me last week. She was elated. After months of being cooped up at home she had finally made it to her London university library, which had just reopened. It’s a measure of how bad things have got that a student doing her finals can register euphoria at readmission to a building not known for its place in the affections of undergraduates.
Like many of her contemporaries, my daughter will struggle to get a job this year. It looks as if a master’s degree, with all the extra debt that entails, is her best option. Not just because it kicks the employment can down the road. Assuming lockdown is lifted, it will allow her – as a postgraduate – to do some of the exciting fieldwork she missed out on as an undergraduate.
As a geologist, these field trips present themselves an antidote to dry scholarship. Last year, a month’s mapping in Spain was cancelled at the last moment. She was dejected. “Gutted Dad, gutted”. Even a back-up plan to stare at rocks in Scotland for a fortnight had to be abandoned as travel bans came into force.
With some passion, my eldest points out that she is paying £9,250 a year to study online what is available – gratis – via the Open University. But, at least, when things return to normal, her chances of getting a well-paid job are good.
With some passion, my eldest points out that she is paying £9,250 a year to study online what is available – gratis – via the Open University.
Last year geologists at another part of the University of London came top of a league table of graduate salaries. Six months after graduating their average wage was £73,267. That was, by contrast, five times the pay of graduates in psychology at Liverpool Hope University.
Her choice of subject was nothing to do with me. That said, I’m chary of courses like the one in psychology offered by Liverpool Hope. It’s not about the institution, just the subject. For psychology read media studies or sports science. Subjects that are neither fish nor fowl. Not abstract enough to provide learning for the sake of learning. Nor vocational enough to offer training that couldn’t be offered on-the-job.
But I would certainly never urge any of my children to choose a degree because there were riches at the end of the undergraduate rainbow. My middle two daughters, for instance, both plan to do arts subjects. One wants to read English Literature, as I did. The other inclines towards history.
I would certainly never urge any of my children to choose a degree because there were riches at the end of the undergraduate rainbow.
Later today, when the online school day finishes I will draw their attention to the front page of The Times. It points out that the number of university students taking English has fallen a third in a decade, those reading history by a fifth.
Chris Patten, once a Catholic schoolboy, now Oxford University Chancellor, told The Times about his dismay. And that most of the current Government were humanities graduates. This may not be the clincher when it comes to persuading people of the virtues of a liberal arts education!
But I have certainly made the case within my own family for English and history, English in particular. For, within it, so many other disciplines lie in wait. To read Chaucer is to get a crash course in medieval history, religion, sociology and psychology. Want an insight into the human condition and the Russian mind? Dostoevsky, surely. How a tall ship works? Really works, for those who spent years in them. Patrick O’Brian. And so on and on. Within literature lies so many of the cures to the oldest ills. Gentle humour as a balm for loss. Biting satire to unseat the pompous and proud. Genius to reveal our own pitiable limitations. Travel without motion. Friends we never meet because they don’t exist outside a writer’s imagination. For all the truth in the assertion that technology has ameliorated the effects of lockdown, it’s also undeniably true that for many people, books have been a lifeline. Of course, you don’t need to have studied literature at university to enjoy a novel or a poem, but it helps.
This is not to set one’s face against science, never more valued than now during the fight against Covid-19. Indeed, the same Times story highlights the expanded provision of medical degrees, a third more courses now on offer compared to ten years ago. This will please my 17-year-old daughter Agnes, who hopes to become a doctor if she can get straight As in chemistry, biology and, wait for it, English.
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