If you glance at the statistics for graduate employment, the Arts and Humanities may appear to be in trouble. Arts and Humanities graduates are more likely to be unemployed or in part-time work than their STEM counterparts; an average salary for an English graduate is about £10 000 less than for a Chemical Engineering graduate.

However, statistics such as average earnings only tell part of the story. Whole life qualities such as job satisfaction, work-life balance, or (especially pertinent in the Arts and Humanities, in which two thirds of students are female) the ability to have flexible careers also matter - although you will rarely see these counted in the higher education marketplace where the only values of concern are those that can be tabulated in a spreadsheet.

Looming on the horizon, though, is another issue which even the most hard-nosed economist should take note of. This is the extent to which different degree qualifications may provide job security against the onrushing tide of automatisation.

In their recent book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcaffee foresee how new technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics promise to improve our lives and social infrastructure, but also threaten to remove whole swathes of jobs from the economy. The most obvious example (as predicted by The Simpsons) is that of autonomous vehicles, which may make taxi drivers, truckers and delivery drivers redundant. As has been true since the Luddites smashed the Jacquard loom, the categories of work that are most threatened by automation will initially be those that entail manual labour. However, while historically those professions have subsequently been replaced by alternative work (think of the person who moves from assembling cars to repairing the robot that assembles the cars), in the twenty-first century there may be fewer substitute categories of work on the horizon. As Derek Thompson has pointed out in his brilliantly depressing Atlantic piece on A World Without Work:

Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5 percent of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications. Our newest industries tend to be the most labor-efficient: they just don’t require many people.

It is these niche high-tech sectors that, for the first time, may be most threatened by the advent of algorithmic learning, computer problem solving, and the digital economy. Consider two revealing examples: the growth of AI website builders such as The Grid, and out-sourced programming pools.

This is where the recent NESTA report that the UK is home to a fifth of creative workers in Europe becomes especially interesting. As The Guardian mentioned in a comment piece on the report, the creative economy may be one sector that is protected against automation, given that creativity is something machines are not (yet) particularly good at. A machine may be able to build a car, but is not able to design it in a way that will marry aesthetics to engineering in a pleasing and efficient way. Robots can perform in plays, but can't write them. The digital age may have allowed us to visit museums virtually, but that has only boosted the demand for visits in person to thoughtfully curated exhibitions.

Of course, the knots linking graduates to careers are very tangled, and it's not possible to suggest that a more creative and less vocational degree necessarily offers better long term security against the trends of the future. Equally, it's evident that there are whole swathes of professions requiring science, engineering, medical backgrounds that will not only survive but thrive in the new economy.

Nevertheless, given that Arts and Humanities are under increasing pressure to prove their worth, and are continually undermined at a political level (witness, for instance, the recent extension of student loans to Equivalent Level Qualification students in STEM subjects alone), we in these disciplines ought surely to scope out the field and to consider the implications of the rise of automation.

Might the soft and transferable skills that we teach be precisely those that are safest from unplanned obsolescence?

As it stands, it's pretty hard to see how we might set about examining this question further. The key dataset - HESA's Destinations of Leavers in Higher Education - is not particularly instructive. Industry fields are lumped together in broad headings such as 'Manufacturing' or 'Construction', but these encapsulate a range of skills, from manual industry (which may be threatened) to creative skills such as design or architecture (which may be safe). Equally 'Education', a destination for a significant proportion of Arts and Humanities graduates, covers primary through to higher, but while Higher Education teaching may be eroded with the advent of MOOCs, it's hard to see that primary teachers could be eliminated by the digital community any time soon (robots make pretty poor Kindergarten Cops!). To untangle these treads, we need finer data that thinks more carefully about what individual jobs entail, and where the skills to do them might come from: are they degree level skills or derived from elsewhere?

Until we have such data in our hands, faced with the rise of the robots, I'd probably still take an Uzi 9mm above an intimate knowledge of sixteenth-century French prosody.

Labels: arts and humanities, automation, career destinations, careers, higher education, the second machine age, University Life

An article in The Guardian has just caught my eye, reporting on a study that shows that the wealthiest students dominate the arts and humanities, with poorer students opting for science or vocational degrees. The figures on which the report is based, provided by the Sutton Trust, are not quite as extreme as the paper's feature writer would like to make out:

31% of those who graduated in 2008 with degrees in history or philosophy were the children of senior managers – the socio-economic group with the highest income. Across all English university courses, an average of 27% of graduates were from this group.

And:

Language graduates were also disproportionately from the wealthiest homes, with 30% from the highest income group. In comparison, non-arts and humanities courses – with the exception of medicine and dentistry – had far fewer students from the highest-income group. Just 17% for education, 22% for computer sciences and 23% for business studies were from the wealthiest homes.

That 4% difference between those children of senior managers who graduated in history, and those offspring of top professionals who graduated in other subjects, is hardly a statistical gulf. Nevertheless, it does chime with my own experience - both as a student and as a university teacher - that the arts (I'm talking English specifically, of course) attract a certain type of student.

In my own personal experience, coming from a middle class home with two parents who had already been to university, I was always encouraged to study what I enjoyed, which might or might not be most valuable as an ultimate career option. As I moved to A-levels, my college's timetable allowed me to study either physics or history; in the end, I opted for history, which was essential to my application to read English at a top university. It is not hard to imagine that, coming from a different background, I would have been pushed towards the subject that might see me enter university with a vocational career in mind, rather than towards arts A-levels which, at the time, would have had an uncertain exit point from university even if they were pleasurable to do. With different parents, I could have been another victim of the UK's unusual funnelling in further and higher education, which sees UK students forced to specialise in their subjects far earlier than their continental and transatlantic counterparts. It is easy to imagine A-level students who love English but who happen to be good at a science subject being pushed by their parents into studying the latter, when if they were allowed to study a broader spectrum of subjects for a longer period, the students themselves rather than parental background would determine which subjects they enjoy, which should be a factor in which subject to choose at university.

In the present day reality, though, as a teacher I do perceive that students who start English degrees tend to come from a narrow social class mix. At the top-ten university at which I teach (which shall of course remain nameless), across the arts and humanities 48% of students came from independent schools, whereas only 33% of students in the sciences came from that educational background. In English, an astonishing 65% of students came from independent schools. Our tutorials echo with the voices of privilege. Ben Knights, director of the English subject centre, has worried that "There could be a progressive gentrification of arts and humanities." I agree - although my fears here are tempered by my experiences teaching for the Open University, which attracts a much more diverse mix of students.

But regardless of the facts here, we do run the risk of creating a fallacy if we draw an association between the social class of students and the types of degree they do. The Guardian article (and many of the commentators below it) seem to be making the pejorative assumption that if wealthy students (or students of wealthy parents) are doing arts degrees then the degrees themselves must be self-indulgent and ultimately worthless. This is entirely false.

For a start, the arts sector is a large scale employer in the UK. According to Prospects, the UK's official careers website, 6.2% of graduates went into careers as arts, culture and media professionals; marketing, sales and advertising (another common destination for arts' graduates) comprised another 4%. According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the creative arts sector employs 1.8 million people in the UK. Even assuming that not all jobs in this sector will require a traditional arts degree, it is clearly wrong to assume that the arts and humanities are soft and self-indulgent subjects which have no socio-economic benefit.

As for employment, although the present recession sees uncertain prospects for all graduates, 7.9% of Arts' graduates were unemployed six months after graduating, whereas 8.5% of science graduates were unemployed after the same period. Now, in the longer term it may be true that science graduates can expect to earn more than their arts counterparts, but again it is a myth that arts graduates are doing economically unviable subjects.

Supported by figures like these, it is vital that the economic case for the arts is made with conviction and clarity. In the past, a story about the class bias in degrees might simply be an ideological footnote to be picked up by a left-wing paper like The Guardian. But in the present economic climate, the stakes are much higher. Whitehall officials are considering slashing the Higher Education teaching budget by 75%. Having been told to protect "strategically important" subjects such as science and technology and engineering, budgets for subjects in the arts and humanities look likely to be hardest hit. Stories about the wealthy class of students these subjects attract will make them seem a tempting double-target, not only seen as strategically unimportant but also as an opportunity to bash the sons and daughters of all those wealthy but worthless bankers and lawyers, the liberal elites who got us into the recession in the first place.

Such tabloid prose is of course absurdly simplistic. But then so too are governments (I include New Labour here too) which bean counts the impact factors of university research, and the perceived direct correlation between the number of engineers and accountants in an economy, and gross domestic product which has become the sole measure of the success of our national culture.

Labels: careers, English Literature, University Life

Vitae have recently released a report "What Do Researchers Do? First Destinations of Doctoral Graduates by Subject" (2003-2007). This is a follow-up to their earlier groundbreaking study "What Do PhDs Do?" The new report is typically concise and neatly presented, so postgraduates should find it easy to find information relevant to their own disciplines. However, here are a few of the headlines that most interested me in relation to the Arts and Humanities:

• Research occupations account for 18% of post-PhD employment for Arts and Humanities graduates, with 14% researching within the Higher Education sector. This is significantly lower than the averages for all PhD graduates, which were 35% and 23% respectively. In other words, graduates from Arts and Humanities disciplines are half as likely to continue in research posts than those from other disciplines. This should not be surprising given the emphasis on post-doctoral research in the sciences and the prioritisation of public funding to STEM subjects or investment in technological research by the private sector.
• Whilst half of all doctoral students continued into employment in the education sector, for Arts and Humanities doctorates, education comprised the career destination for two-thirds of graduates. Again, this is not surprising, given that generally the only careers which will allow continued pursuit of Arts and Humanities subjects in their purest sense will be teaching-related.
• Arts and Humanities doctorates were slightly less likely to find employment or go into combined employment and training than other doctorates. 76% of Arts and Humanities doctorates were employed or training post-PhD, as opposed to 81% of all other respondents. This is good news, in that it suggests that the model of the employable and "useful" sciences graduate, and the unemployable because "useless" arts graduate, is a fallacy, at least at doctoral level.
• At 3.4% in 2007, the unemployment rate for doctoral graduates was consistently lower than for those with just one first degree (6.8%). In my essay on The Value of an English PhD, which worked with data from the earlier study on "What Do PhDs Do?," I noted that the unemployment statistics for English PhDs versus English graduates were marginal, 6% versus 8.2%. The good news for PhD students across the Arts and Humanities is that the value of having that further qualification seems to be increasing, something that would seem logical given that recruiters are increasingly looking for second degrees to distinguish ever-larger cohorts of candidates with first degrees.

On the whole, then, for Arts and Humanities doctorates the report makes pretty positive reading. There is, however, a skeleton in the closet. This report surveyed doctoral graduates from 2003-2007, largely before the credit crunch and certainly before the squeeze on public sector spending that will come in this new parliament.

Investment in science research from the private sector will no doubt have been affected as corporations trim their budgets. However, with the recession being less intense than expected and business being systemically aware of the value of entrepreneurship and innovation, it is likely that the subsequent hit on science doctoral graduates will be restrained. By contrast, since Arts and Humanities doctorates rely so heavily on the education sector, especially Higher Education, to provide their employment prospects, that there seems little doubt that they will be hit by the squeeze on Higher Education funding, which will seek to protect STEM subjects at the expense of those deemed as being of less relevance or "impact." This is especially true of my own subject, English, for which an astonishing 77% of doctoral graduates were subsequently employed in education.

That self-fullfilling cycle, where Arts and Humanities post-graduates are needed to teach future generations of Arts and Humanities under-graduates, is set to slow down dramatically over the coming years, with drastic consequences for the three-quarters of doctorates who rely on the sector for their future jobs.

Labels: careers, credit crunch, spending cuts, University Life, What Do Researchers Do First Destinations of Doctoral Graduates