{"id":473,"date":"2018-04-22T18:24:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-22T17:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hilarymoriarty.co.uk\/blog\/?p=473"},"modified":"2018-04-22T18:24:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-22T17:24:00","slug":"measuring-value-by-degrees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/?p=473","title":{"rendered":"Measuring value by degrees"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How will the university landscape impact the next generation?<\/p>\n\n\n

Go on then \u2013 what is it worth?  Not your second-hand car or even your\n best tip for the Grand National. No, your degree. When did you get it\nand what is it worth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s perhaps not surprising that degrees\nshould have turned into a weird kind of currency. They are valuable\nthings, and not just for the CV. A good degree will enrich your life, in\n more ways than one, and right from the start; academically, culturally,\n mentally. And perhaps some of the ways are in fact more valuable than\nthe simply pecuniary benefits which might well come your way because of\nyour degree and might even have been your first reason for wanting a\ndegree. I do not know what Mary Beard earns, but I do know that her\nbrain has been better fed \u2013 and for a lot longer \u2013 than mine and has\ndeveloped in ways I can only envy.  David Attenborough? Ditto. I\u2019m not\njust making a plea for the arts and humanities here, though to do so\nmight be timely, given today\u2019s emphasis on STEM development in all\npupils, regardless of talent or interest.<\/p>\n\n\n

There are times when the\n world offers a statement of fact \u2013 in this case, people with a degree\nearn more in their lifetimes than those without a degree \u2013 and then\nconcludes that the one is a consequence of the other. And if this is\ntrue, says the politician, then what we really need to solve the\nproblems of poverty is for more people to get a degree \u2013 because that is\n the golden ticket, isn\u2019t it? Degree, good job, big(ish) salary, nice\npension, happy families all round.  Clearly, making degrees more\navailable to more people is the answer to poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n

You might say, a\n lot of rich people have a nice car, so if we give everyone a nice car,\nthey too will become rich. Somehow, you just know that\u2019s not how it\nworks. But the notion of everyone getting a degree, no matter where\nfrom, or in what subject, or with what content seems to have taken hold,\n and it may be churlish to carp, and perhaps point out that the very\nfact they are commonplace may slightly devalue degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n

So\n what\u2019s a degree worth if it doesn\u2019t actually lift you to the higher\nechelons of employment and recompense? Enter the statisticians, who are\nable to tell us that the best salaries are earned by people with degrees\n in STEM subjects, medicine and law. So let\u2019s have lots of people with\ndegrees, but you know what?  There will still be a pecking order.<\/p>\n\n\n

Then\n you might consider who will pay for these degrees, which used to be\ngovernment funded, and came with maintenance grants \u2013 \u00a3360 per annum as I\n recall for the least well-off students, scaling down according to\nparents\u2019 earnings. But the tax payer cannot be expected to fund the\nthousands of students for whom a degree is the new passport to comfort\nand affluence. American students take out loans and pay them off over\ntheir working lives. What a good idea! It looks like a long debt, but it\n will be worth it, won\u2019t it?<\/p>\n\n\n

And what could possibly go wrong?  <\/p>\n\n\n

When\n the new \u2018pay for your degree with a student loan\u2019 system arrived, the\noriginal fees were in the region of \u00a33,000 a year, for whatever course a\n student fancied, from medicine to golf course management, whether it\nwas an arts or science degree.  Now any fool could tell you that a\ndegree involving long hours every day in small classes doing practicals\nin a laboratory, with masses of equipment and a lab technician in\nattendance, is going to cost more to deliver than a history or English\ndegree where you would be lucky to see a lecturer five times a week for a\n single hour at a time and in the company of perhaps 100 other students\nin one lovely big lecture hall.  <\/p>\n\n\n

A real student of history, or\nEnglish literature, or sociology or economics or indeed most of the arts\n subjects would, in olden times,  actually spend hours in a library,\nworking just as hard as the engineer with the theodolite or the vet with\n a scalpel, thinking and reading and writing. It was called studying.\nBut these days, all the wisdom of the world is available on the laptop\nor phone. Google is almost a university in its own right. The British\nMuseum might as well fall down. A student going to his\/her local\nuniversity and living at home will spend more time on his\/her computer\nthan in any library, and quite possibly \u2018study\u2019 a very tight range of\nmaterial specifically tailored to the exam. My daughter reports on an\nEnglish literature degree in which lecturers were heckled with \u2018Is this\non the exam, sir?\u2019 with books closing in contempt if the answer was\n\u2018No.\u2019 Breadth of study and expecting to be able to handle any question \u2013\n those days are gone. Today\u2019s utilitarian students, appearing to need a\ndegree more than they want to study anything, want to know enough to\nmake the grade, in a completely \u2018Wham, bam, thank you sir,\u2019 kind of way.\n  <\/p>\n\n\n

\u201cA good degree will enrich your life, in more ways than one, and right from the start; academically, culturally, mentally.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

With\n children of my own emerging from the system just in time, I probably\nmissed the magic wand that raised the fees for any degree to \u00a39,000 a\nyear. The hike was surely predictable; if universities were allowed to\ncharge up to that figure, why would any choose to say, \u2018No, we\u2019re the\ncheap place \u2013 come to us!\u2019 All fees pitched at the top of the range \u2013\nand why not? They would, of course, be worth it, because of the splendid\n jobs which were available to anyone with a degree. Of any kind. From\nany university \u2013 and how many of those have come into being to meet the\ndemand? Is there a market town left in Britain which does not have a\nuniversity?  A far cry from olden times. In my day, there were only 32\nuniversities in Britain \u2013 and even then, a pecking order, with an\nOxbridge degree simply out on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n

Political pressure \u2013\n\u2018Labour will scrap fees!\u2019 \u2013 has brought talk of reducing the fees for\ndegrees which, officially, produce a less well-paid working life.\nYesterday\u2019s headline, \u2018I will make arts degrees cheaper, says new\neducation secretary,\u2019 tells us the way the wind is blowing. Because arts\n degrees are cheaper to run \u2013 fewer lectures to larger numbers, that\nsounds reasonable. But we risk the assumption that because arts and\nhumanities degrees are cheap to provide, they are also easy to do, and\nactually not worth studying. No one will want them; they will be\ndowngraded. In our mercenary world, worth less because you pay less for\nthem. And possibly, therefore, worthless.<\/p>\n\n\n

Which is a dangerous way\n to go, because the arts and humanities are vital for life beyond\nutilitarian pragmatism, reminding us that we are creatures of heart and\nsoul as well as muscle and bone.  We can inspire as well as invent,\ncreate as well as discover, study as well as learn. <\/p>\n\n\n

And as for your degree? Cherish it. It\u2019s probably one of the originals. And the market may shortly flood.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

This article first appeared in IE-Today on 1 April 2018<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How will the university landscape impact the next generation? Go on then \u2013 what is it worth?  Not your second-hand car or even your best tip for the Grand National. No, your degree. When did you get it and what is it worth?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[74,96,226],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ie-today","tag-degrees","tag-further-education","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}