Earlier this month, the think-tank called Onward published a report, "A Question of Degree", which argues that degrees in the creative arts are not good value for money. Ministers, according to Onward, should "crack down on courses that offer extremely limited value for money to students ten years after graduation", restricting the ability of such courses to recruit new students, if the average graduate earns below the student loans payment threshold. Courses like science, technology, engineering, and math, and economics, where the average graduate earns a lot, should be favored.
The report provides insight into a government review which looks at how to reform technical education and how to ensure students get good value for money. At first glance, it might even seem like Onward have a point. According to their data, the majority of creative arts students earn less than 25,000 pounds a year, ten years after graduation. The average male creative arts students, indeed, apparently earn much less than they would, had they simply never gone to university. This isn't really good for anyone, and it's certainly no good for graduates, who are forced to endure a lifestyle where they can never save up, never buy a house, never hope to retire.
Onward has identified a real problem. Creative arts graduates from top universities—like Oxford, with a high proportion of privately-educated students—have fairly good work prospects. Well, 40 percent of all graduates—regardless of their degree—are on less than 25,000 pounds a year, 5 years after graduation. This suggests that the problem isn't really to do with specific students studying specific degrees, but really with the economy as a whole. Regardless of what they've studied, young people find it hard to get ahead unless they're lucky enough to be born with successful parents.
If ministers want to make education pay for young people, they need to look beyond the higher education sector, towards the wider world. The rewards that education gives us are not measurable. They are not always instantly obvious, and certainly not always direct. An education makes you a different person from the one you would have been if you hadn't received it. We need to look at the value of education not in the context of a bank balance, but of a life. If we continue to allow ourselves to be distracted with talk of "value for money", we will all be made poorer as a result.