For her £3,290, my [Maths-reading] housemate receives approximately 16 hours of formal tuition per week in the form of lectures, seminars and problem classes. As an arts student, I have never received more than eight hours' tuition in a week. In the second semester of my final year, I face just two hours per week. Figures similar to these can be identified throughout most, if not all, universities in the UK. So why is it that I receive half the amount of tuition, for the same price as my housemate?The nub of her concern, made acute by the imminence of graduation, is:
. . . the seeming ease with which science students find employment when compared with arts students. I receive internship alerts from a leading graduate employment firm and I still find myself amazed at the number and variety of internships that are tailored towards those with degrees in the sciences. Therefore, we see arts and social science students emerging from university having had less tuition than many of their peers and with worse prospects for the future, yet with similar amounts of debt, having paid the same amount of money.The last part is unanswerable, and is a powerful argument for permitting universities to charge differential fees. The first part, alas, simply registers that employers reckon that only "hard" degrees offer proof that a candidate is disciplined and hard-working. Were she to check out lower down the examination scale, she would see that universities are practising the same triage to sort out the mass of candidates with multiple "A" levels.
It's called the market, and although the teachers' unions have redefined "outcomes" to mean box-ticking, the only outcome that matters is the one that enables young people to develop their potential to the full. And that is hard to do when you can't get a job.
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Unless you move from the arts into Law or Business, there are, to begin with, far fewer paying jobs, mostly in teaching. In the US as in England, universities proliferated for a time and every small college of any name turned into one.(excepting those with important names).
ReplyDeleteThen they became more expensive as education itself did and the teaching jobs began to shrink as did financial resources.
As the MBA assumed its godlike position, and the
more frivolous departments (Black Studies, Queer Studies, et al) began to lose their fresh hopeful appeal, at least in America, you began to get whole university graduating lots of e.g., English PhD's without any jobs awaiting them.
I confidently expect a one year degree in Cab Driving to emerge and another in Table Waiting. Bar Tending perhaps?
You think you jest: in lovely Chapel Hill in North Carolina the joke is you have to have at least an MA to drive a cab!
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