The latest Ucas figures, showing a three.5% increase in university applications, can be seen as an encouraging sign. There’s been a small move back towards the applying numbers seen before the tutoring fee hikes, which might suggest teenagers aren’t being cast off reaching their potential through higher education.
However a better take a look at the numbers reveals a more damaged picture. While applications to vocational and career-priming subjects resembling computer sciences and law have indeed risen significantly (12.5% and 5% respectively), applications to review non-vocational subjects have fallen for a second year running.
Faced with average tuition fees of over £8,000 a year and a tricky employment market, students are shunning humanities and humanities degrees, and putting their faith in courses they suspect will land them a task.
This is not surprising for sure. Through selective funding cuts, the govt. is making an attempt to influence students towards those subjects it thinks will benefit the country’s economy.
Welcome to the true legacy of the coalition’s fee rises: students become mere consumers of an academic product, paying to receive a certificate in a topic that the federal government is gambling directly to provide the talents that our job market will demand in future years. Meanwhile universities become soulless research institutes, as their arts and arts programmes wilt away.
One such programme is philosophy, an issue it is struggling to outlive after funding cuts and a 17.4% drop in applications during the last two years. Departments are facing closure at several universities, including my very own. It sort of feels a course that was ok for Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus or even Ricky Gervais isn’t any longer considered to be of value to today’s youth. But do we really afford to let it fall by the wayside
Socrates declared: “The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” There’s a compulsion within us all to look for the fact, and philosophy gives students the prospect to do exactly that, asking deep questions and considering the answers given by a few of history’s greatest minds. Minds that, in every case, share a skill with philosophy graduates – the facility to think critically. While not all philosophy students are geniuses, you’ll struggle to locate a genius without an interest in philosophy.
This in turn suggests philosophy students will not be as unattractive to the job market because the government thinks. While there isn’t any set career path for a philosophy graduate, many employers have an interest in students who know the way to argue, critically evaluate and think in innovative, creative ways.
Eliza Veretilo, 22, is a philosophy graduate from the University of Greenwich. Now employed at Life in London, an organisation that supports teenagers susceptible to being excluded from mainstream education, she finds the abilities she learned on her philosophy course invaluable.
Veretilo says: “My degree helped me to be more open-minded to different circumstances. many of the youngsters I work with have lost all hope and perspective, and i’m ready to share my ability to think in numerous ways – and express ideas differently – with them. It is a real help.”
She also notes that her degree was a giant plus to her employer: “They knew i might good at approaching things rationally, and i would have the high levels of literacy that the role requires.”
Today’s students must avoid falling into the trap of changing into graduate clones. Daring to spend your higher education years doing something you can not do for the remainder of your life might just repay in spite of everything.
• This newsletter was amened on 12 February. It previously attributed the quote “An unexamined life isn’t worth living” to Sophocles. This was as a result of a mistake inside the editing processing.
