Confessions of a Humanities Degree holder
I have several degrees but my first is in Humanities. According to Emma Duncan (Times 16th June 2023) there are too many Humanities degree holders and not enough jobs for them. She is forgetting of course the multi-million pounds arts and entertainments industries, although according to her these are not well paid enough (this may well be true particularly where non-unionised).
Unsurprisingly Sunak and the Tories agree and are now looking Gradgrind like to grade degrees on a metric that will determine how much ‘value’ they add
Duncan and Sunak seems curiously( and probably deliberatley) ignorant of the point that while the subject of your degree has significance it is the process of learning and education that counts as much. Hence when I got a job after graduating in the late 1970s it was with Post Office Telecoms. They took the view that managers could put their hand to most things with the benefit of a degree. In due course, based on in-house training and experience, I became an executive engineer a technical role entirely unrelated to the subject of my degree.
Further while the job could always be better paid it currently pays well above the average wage.
Duncan argues that a new book by Peter Turchin demonstrates that the revolutions of 1848 and 1917 (for example) were caused by the reality that there were too many young people and not enough jobs. While this is an interesting theory it probably requires some further research.
Duncan goes on to suggest that there are just too many graduates nowadays and students should confine themselves to doing vocational degrees which lead to specific jobs (not in the humanities).
In my view education is a good thing itself and a liberal education- which is what Duncan is arguing against- is mark of a decent society. But then this is in the Murdoch Times so what would you expect?
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