The really useful company: Graduates, employment and the humanities

Abstract

What are universities for? No, seriously. For enlightenment? Intellectual debate? `Widening participation'? Development of skills? Training for the professions? Ah, now we see it. The slippery slope of current political rhetoric becomes insidious as we move from Cardinal Newman to John Randall in five easy stages. But that rhetoric is dangerous, as much for what it omits as for what it includes. At the dawn of the new century, when the debate about the role of universities in our society is high on the agenda, the overt message coming from politicians and government agencies is that a university education carries weight in proportion to its vocational relevance. OK, so it's expensive -- but that expense can perhaps be justified if graduates then pay back the community that has so selflessly helped to `train' them. By promoting the professional and practical aspects of degree courses, the language of skills implicitly and inexorably downgrades the values of disciplines in the arts and humanities. Engineering is good because society needs bridges; computing is better because it is in touch with global needs; medicine, law and accountancy are self-evidently a rung up the moral ladder of employability because it is a truth universally acknowledged that professionals are a vital part of the social fabric. But the humanities ... dear me ... what can be said? Virtually nothing, it appears. Well, for a start, there are at least two objections to this sneaky pejoration. Firstly, insofar as the debate implies a hierarchy of disciplines based upon immediate social utility, the claim is unsustained by fact, and grossly misrepresents the real relations between employment and subject of study. Secondly, such a debate dismisses key aspects of the character and social value of higher education. At a time of national uncertainty about higher education -- the identification of students as `customers' shows the muddle we are in -- these questions urgently' need to be addressed. The key debate about employability needs to be founded on an entirely different basis, and can only be understood as part of a mesh of other complex functions performed by universities and colleges in modern cultures. Let us begin with the misrepresentation. The data collected on first employment destinations by UK graduates reveals no gross disparities in performance across the subject range. Some, like medicine and nursing, achieve very high, fast entries into predictable employment. However, while most subjects are not so streamlined in their profile, no subject at all produces a return which disgraces its discipline. Across the board, around 90 per cent of all graduates available for work, including those in arts and humanities subjects, are employed or enter further training (usually with a vocational orientation, as in the cases of teaching or law) within a year of graduation. The overall pattern is consistent across disciplines and across time. In 1995, for example, 12.1 per cent of graduates in English were unemployed within a year, while the corresponding figure for Business Studies was only a fraction lower at 12 per cent. Last year, this tiny difference was, as it happened, reversed, with English graduates entering jobs 0.1 per cent more readily than their friends in Business Studies. The same pattern is observable in the United States, where the more specialised missions of many HEIs, and the more considerable investment in record keeping by institutions keen to sell their best story, means that data are fuller and more precise. Liberal arts colleges, which cover the arts and humanities spectrum, are justly proud of consistent employment returns at around 95 per cent. This fact has been known for years, partly as a result of HE administrators making it their firm business to make it be known. As a result, enrolments in the liberal arts at American institutions are sustained at consistently high levels. There are three important truths here. …