In some ways, it is scarcely worth responding to Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to end “rip-off” degrees such as – we presume – performing arts, English, design, sociology, anthropology, media and psychology.
Yes, yes, the disgusting engineers are having a go at the luvvies.
Slashing arts degrees because they don’t make enough money, you say? First of all: what on earth do you think the purpose of human life is? Isn’t it something like: “pursue joy, deal justly with your fellow humans, love well, try to understand and see as much of this beautiful world and of the richness and variety of human culture and experience as you can before you die”?
None of which requires a degree of course.
The creative industries are a powerhouse for the British economy. The UK has some of the best talent in the world in film and television (for the benefit of Badenoch, that’s “performing arts”). Not just actors but producers, lighting experts, directors, camera operators, graphic artists, CGI experts, makeup artists, costume creators, casting mavens.
High-end television production companies from around the world come to Britain to make great work. Performing arts is a huge industry for Britain. The creative industries add £124bn of value to the UK; the University and College Union (UCU) called Badenoch’s plans “economically illiterate”.
None of which requires a degree of course.
Perhaps we really should replace all arts degrees with something in basic logic?
Isn’t the problem more the fact that the vast majority of graduates in these subjects don’t go on to make a good living from them but end up doing low end jobs instead? It used to be that the whole point of further education was to gain qualifications that would allow you to go on to commanding a higher salary. If you are spending a lot of time and money on getting a degree that doesn’t do that, isn’t that pretty much the definition of a rip off?
It’s not just the graduates in lesbian basketweaving studies who are ripped off, but the taxpayer who is on the hook for their loans.
Gill has a youtube short on mad PhDs in lesbian that are being pursued
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DOWVbCbgYk
It makes you wonder if we need the “Arts and Humanities Research Council”, or if we do want that, whether it can become a charity funded by voluntary donuts.
I was talking to a young lad working for a drainage contractor I have working on my farm the other day. He was 17, on an apprenticeship, one day a week in college. He said he and all his mates hate being forced to stay in education, they want to work full time, make some money. He was on £120/day being a basic gofer, driving tractor loads of stone around, shifting pipes, doing basic 360 excavator work where he couldn’t do any damage. Thats the equivalent of £30k/yr at 17. By the time he reaches uni leaving age he’ll probably be on £200+/day as an experienced worker. How many graduates walk into a £50k/yr job at 22? How many graduates never earn £50k/yr?
Its high time universities were largely closed down. STEM stuff can remain, the rest can go. No one needs the History of Art, and if they want to learn about it, do it in your own time while doing something actually productive. The extra advantage would be get rid of all the grievance studies as well.
I’m surprised actually that our economist host doesn’t argue that we don’t need any graduates at all, we can just import them. Thats what he argues for physical goods, so why doesn’t it apply to people as well?
You seem to be straying into Spud territory. People are more than welcome to study history of art, as far as I am concerned, as long as I don’t end up paying their debts.
Universities have done more damage to this country than the Germans did between 1939 and 1945. They should be razed to the ground and the earth sown with salt. Everyone involved with running one should be sent for 10 years forced labour doing something useful, like scrubbing toilets, as a penance.
A university education was and should be open only to an elite – the ‘academic’ top 5% of sixth-formers. Subsidise STEM provision (eg labs are expensive) and even provide loans to STEM students. Preserve traditional humanities degrees – from History of Art to Old Norse Poetry – by establishing endowed funds (with tax relief for donations?) at universities that are centres of excellence in that particular field. If these funds could not fund courses, they could at least provide bursaries. Meanwhile, eliminate grievance studies, golf course management, surfing studies, etc. And also reduce the number of places available to study Eng Lit, politics, sociology etc – all degrees that now involve leftist indoctrination.
Spud territory is providing the course whether or not it’s economically productive for “social” reasons. Jim is marketplace. If you want to learn history of art, pay for it.
The thing is, it’s not even that hard to make £50K, £100K or more as a 22 year old. But you don’t need* a degree. You just need to be able to sell.
Universities can’t teach you to sell. It’s a social skill, not an academic one. Going down the market to hawk fruit is going to teach you more in an afternoon than you’d learn from years at yooni.
If anything, yoonis harm young people’s chances of earning money in sales. They keep them institutionalised in a fake environment where “success” is about doing homework and exams and following instructions. In the real world, success is about transferring money from the customer’s pocket to your pocket on a repeatable and sustainable basis and getting them to thank you for it. Do that, and nobody gives a fuck if you start work late or slope off early, or shag the receptionist. Your number will set you free. Why be a clock puncher when you can be James Bond?
*the exception is HR departments that use degree status to narrow down the applicants. In all the interviews I’ve ever done, which are for good paying jobs, I’ve never cared about their educational history because it’s completely irrelevant to the work. That applies to techies as much as sales, because computer science degrees don’t teach you how to do anything valuable – professional qualifications from Microsoft, AWS and Cisco and practical experience are what we want.
“That applies to techies as much as sales, because computer science degrees don’t teach you how to do anything valuable – professional qualifications from Microsoft, AWS and Cisco and practical experience are what we want.”
You need about a year to learn the theoretical side of software, if that. You won’t get any more than that from yooni because none of the people running comp sci courses ever left yooni. They’ve never worked in a bank or an online company and fixed code at 3am. They’re in a bubble of the same sort of thinking from the 1970s still being applied, like how many instructions are being executed, how file systems work. And you almost certainly don’t need to know it. I saw a uni course where someone was including the math of public key. You never need to know that. It works, there are functions. Just know what function to call.
I’m generally sceptical of university because it’s all out of touch with reality. There was a time when university got retired practitioners. The film course at CalArts used to be run by the director of Whisky Galore and The Man in the White Suit. You could draw on decades of experience. Now, these courses are run by someone who put a film into the Hebden Bridge LGBT film festival, and was watched by 5 people. It’s just academic bollocks teaching to more academic bollocks. If you want to make films, watch some, make some, read books and courses by directors. Figure it out.
The only fields I think are good are around hard science and medicine because that’s where the sources of research are. Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge are where the new math, physics, drug research starts. The new stuff going on in computing is at Google or Meta. The new stuff in film is in industry.
This is a general problem with academia – 6 months out and you are damaged goods, and will never get a job there again (speaking from personal experience).
They definitely need to get more of us industry types back in, and pay us our industry salaries to learn from our real world experience, and lark around like professors all day in a lab, or with freshmen (or freshwomen, depending on personal alignment) (none of which happens any more, so I am told).
Too many PhD’s clogged the adjunct pipeline. Why hire an industry professional to teach some courses for a couple years when you can get some guy you gave a doctorate to even though he doesn’t have what it takes to get tenure?
Sure, you’re loosing the ability to bring that industry experience to the students – which was the *point* of an adjunct – but that poor PhD works *cheap!*
You don’t even need any theoretical background to be a networking engineer. I know guys who left school and started out racking and stacking switches as juniors, now CCIEs earning a good living.
Coding is something bright boys used to teach themselves on a Speccy or Amiga with Blitz Basic. How many people in the industry today with computing degrees could even learn Z80 Assembly?
Not that I recommend “learning to code” as a means to earn a living. it’s a severely deprecated skill and you’ll be competing with a billion Jeets, who only hire other Jeets. Rather, people who are bright and curious about technology might want to learn coding skills that support gaining more valuable skills. Like being a database engineer or a ServiceNow developer or something else that’s specialised and in demand. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were famously both college dropouts with a business idea. The world is a lot more stacked against young people now than it was to the Boomers, but entrepreneurialism will never die.
A lot of UK yoonis are telling young people to get into their degree programmes to get a job in the computer game industry. That’s another piece of terrible advice, it’s massively oversubscribed, pay and prospects are shit, and people who work for games developers have a work life that resembles a WW2 death march. But the lad who made Flappy Bird retired with his millions, and Notch sold Minecraft for $2Bn. So if you’re going to make the next Cannon Fodder or Lemmings, just bloody do it, don’t wait for a lecturer who drives a Hyundai to tell you how to be successful, if he knew he wouldn’t be a lecturer.
“Coding is something bright boys used to teach themselves on a Speccy or Amiga with Blitz Basic. How many people in the industry today with computing degrees could even learn Z80 Assembly?”
I learnt a little Z80 assembler, but it’s generally a waste of time today. Even C++ is mostly a waste of time. With cheap CPUs you are better off using C#, Java, Python. Cheaper to throw more boxes at the problem than risk memory leaks.
“Rather, people who are bright and curious about technology might want to learn coding skills that support gaining more valuable skills. Like being a database engineer or a ServiceNow developer or something else that’s specialised and in demand.”
This is part of the same trade-off. Back when we were on Z80s, you needed assembler. You needed to come up with cute tricks to make 3D Monster Maze fit into 48K. But RAM is cheap now.
A small part of my job is coding. It’s a chore, it’s boring. Because making it complicated is pointless. So I add value elsewhere. I’m more analyst/designer/coder/tester. And I was shifting that way before the Indians because I saw there was value to it. That making a report that runs on Sunday for 5 minutes run 20% quicker was a waste.
It’s why hardcore nerds, people who get a boner about CosmosDB over SQL Server performance are a fucking menace in most places. Yeah, it performs better, it’s faster. But it doesn’t have the features of SQL Server so all the code has to be more complicated. All the queries have to be more complicated. You save £10 a month on hosting but add days of coding and a load of risk.
“A lot of UK yoonis are telling young people to get into their degree programmes to get a job in the computer game industry. That’s another piece of terrible advice, it’s massively oversubscribed, pay and prospects are shit, and people who work for games developers have a work life that resembles a WW2 death march. But the lad who made Flappy Bird retired with his millions, and Notch sold Minecraft for $2Bn. So if you’re going to make the next Cannon Fodder or Lemmings, just bloody do it, don’t wait for a lecturer who drives a Hyundai to tell you how to be successful, if he knew he wouldn’t be a lecturer.”
Oh it’s a terrible thing. Truly. Not only that because politicians and media types don’t actually know how bad it is, but then of course, you get shit lecturers who don’t even know what they’re talking about.
I fucking hate how these cunts talk about “the creative industries” like it’s a regular job. “Musicians aren’t making money” “authors aren’t making money” yeah, because there’s too many of them.
The best reason for kids to build games is to learn to build systems. You get Unity 3D. You learn to do it in C# (useful). You connect to APIs, to databases (to save games). Dick around, have fun. Amazon aren’t going to let you touch their code, but you can get your first foot on the ladder that might get you there.
Yeah, none of the code I wrote other than the half dozen university assignments was because somebody told me to do it. I created what I created because I had a yen to create it, and it either filled a desire or accomplished a task I needed doing.
WB
Being a ‘systems man’ IE hopeless at programming, I had to know the stuff that you listed above.
I taught myself protocols, how to tune kernels and most importantly how to diagnose and debug stuff. This meant reading traces and understand the calls that were contained therein.
I held for years, though, a CompSci degree from the 1990s onwards only gave graduates 6 months advantage.
Also mathematicians make the best programmers, because they can think in the logical steps that a good program requires.
People like me, whose heads are full of junk, find it very difficult.
I had about six years of practical experience before I went to university, doing a course called “Computing Science”, and consequently spent three years wondering when we’d actually “do” something. Consequently, I spent most of my time chasing cute Japanese girls.
Stony – the problem is fraud.
Financial fraud – 17 year olds are being missold economically worthless but expensive degrees by clown colleges under the false prospectus that it’ll lead them to good paying jobs. Which is why, for decades now, so many “graduate recruitment” schemes have paid less than you’d get cleaning windows.
Academic fraud – Universities are engaged in the wholesale falsification of knowledge, and pretense of scientific discipline: “studies say”, “research shows”, “experts believe”. It’s why we can rely on them to always come to conclusions that support the exact same narratives around “climate change”, “racism”, “transphobia”, etc. etc.
Universities also pretend to be temples of inquiry, when in reality they are the most monstrously ideologically oppressive environments ever to exist outside of the Soviet Union.
Kitties, you know what to do.
Those kitties are pussies…
Lions with lasers
It used to be that the whole point of further education was to gain qualifications that would allow you to go on to commanding a higher salary.
Well no. Originally, the point of further education was to become “educated’ (don’tcha-know?) meet all the right people & be invited to the best houses. It’s was for the second sons & failures. The qualification for the higher salary was being able to hack it.
Further education was to gain qualifications that would allow you to go on to commanding a higher salary was a passing phase from the 70s to the early 2000s.
@ bis
One did not meet “all the right people” in Further Education – one did that in “Higher Education”
I haven’t a clue which is which & does it really matter? Higher education takes place on hills?
High education takes place on drugs.
Nope! Universities appeared in the medieval period [1] to provide vocational training for professions like law, medicine, and theology, [2] to serve the needs of the bureaucracies of church and state bureaucracies for literate and numerate administrators, and [3] to serve as centres for higher learning. Graduates could expect upward social mobility and increased earnings. From the 1970s onwards, the graduate salary premium declined…
Both of you are correct.
Theophrastus is right that the medieval university was about “vocational training for professions like law, medicine, and theology, to serve the needs of the bureaucracies of church and state”
However after the Reformation they did indeed go through a period of being very much as Bloke in Spain describes them, to “meet all the right people & be invited to the best houses”, particularly the 18th & early 19th centuries.
Walpole, in his defence of Oxford, admitted that “the average undergraduate carried from University little or no learning which was of any service to him”, but that the point of it was to “collect some thousand of the best young men in England, to give them the opportunity of making acquaintance with one another”.
Theo. In the context of the times all those careers you’ve listed were for second sons & failures. First sons & the competent followed the father’s footsteps continuing the family enterprise. The church was where you put the lad who wasn’t safe to be left on his own..And universities didn’t have status they have..(I could say now but…) The University of Paris was widely regarded as a blight on the city. I believe Oxford had a similar effect.
Well, often enough. RN for second son and all these others for third….
One does wonder which of Alfred the Great’s sons irritated him enough to found Oxford.
When I went to work in a stockbroker’s office in the late sixties they tolerated a single economics graduate. And him out of pity because he was Australian.
The prevalence of graduates in politics, commerce & industry exactly correlates with the decline of the UK from being a world power to an irrelevance,
Spot on. It was a luxury thing. Most businesses got skills via apprenticeships. You wanted to be a railway engineer, you went to work for a business and learned from other railway engineers. Which is still about the best way to learn.
Look at the top chefs out there. They either have zero education, or maybe did a City and Guilds in catering for a year at the local college. I don’t think a bit of theory is a bad thing, but most jobs don’t need 3 years of it. We have photography degrees, and the theory for that can be taught in a week, easily.
If only Shakespeare could have done a creative writing degree at the University of Huddersfield, imagine the great work he would have produced.
“Hast thy ever had thine udders feeled?”
All you need to solve the problem of rubbish degrees and universities is to make universities responsible for unpaid student loans. Make them insure against default. You’d still be able to do history of art or English lit at a decent university, but gender studies at a former poly, not so much.
TBH, I don’t quite understand why anyone would pay full fees for an arts degree which involves two lectures and one tutorial a week. Surely this could be provided for £2,500 a year?
Yes, and one thing I would like to see come out of all this mess is for a philanthropic entrepreneurial type to buy a bankrupt university (once the liquidators had sacked all the staff and got rid of the students) and run it on that basis.
Streamline the admin, sensible use of tech for teaching, 2-year degrees on the Buckingham model, hire part-time lecturers who are experts in their field and know their stuff, rather than having a PhD, and keep them part-time because you want them to keep working in their field to keep current. Fees around £3k a year.
The rest of the sector would be up in arms, but it would show what could be done.
History of Art should just be a paid subject, at a private college. There are plenty of posh girls that have rich daddies without making demands on cleaners to pay for it.
And they’ll teach the odd brilliant poor kid that can’t get enough of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Because that’s what always happens. People want to nurture great talent. I think it’s instinctive, that people in a field want to help raw talent.
The UK has some of the best talent in the world in film and television
Excellent news, I think we may have solved the bbc funding issue (ok not entirely excellent then) by simply abolishing the licence fee and letting it support itself by dint of the world class output of this talent pool.
The modern state is run by people with useless degrees. Moreover, as we have seen all too vividly in the last 30 years, it is not intellect that counts, but brown nosing and networking. How else could a moron like Starmer get the gig as DPP ? Or Chris Smith who was a useless Arts minister become a quango queen ?
Talent will out and the banks and corporations will still hoover up bright kids, regardless of their degree.
Problem is : inflation. With the Blair reforms and this push to put 50% of yoof through ‘universities’, the general value of degrees has been diluted. The cream still rises to the top and talent spotters will still go to the same Oxbridge colleges.
<i>The cream still rises to the top and talent spotters will still go to the same Oxbridge colleges.</i>
To find talent like the current president of the Oxford Union
Art, like sport, doesn’t need a degree.
It requires some natural talent and a lot of practice.
Artists like to think of themselves as individual thinkers, but they’re some of the biggest sheep on the planet.
I used to date one girl at uni who was studying art. She seemed normal (we were at the start of our courses) then one day after a few weeks she suddenly dyed her hair, changed her style to “be herself and stand against societal expectations”. Turned out most of her course mates were doing the same thing.
She wasn’t too impressed when I pointed out that society expects art students to rebel and be “edgy” so really all she was doing was conforming to expectations and if she really wanted to be different she’d go to classes in a suit and be formal.
That relationship didn’t last much longer…
The problem is artists think of themselves as some sort of free thinker, where their art has deep meaning instead being what it’s supposed to be – pretty pictures or sculptures for us to put on our wall to look nice.
There are far too many really average people trying to make a living in the arts. And in particular women.
Most people should have art as a fun thing, a side hustle. Do a job and play in a band on a Saturday night. Raise kids, but paint a few things you flog now and again.
Most women simply do not have the commitment to be great artists. They won’t do clinical trials to raise money like Robert Rodriguez or do 60 hour weeks like Prince, or forge filming permits like Werner Herzog. James Cameron designed new cameras to make Avatar, so the 3D was better. Little of the innovation in cinema has been because of women.
The whole girlboss thing only works if women will make the sacrifices to have it. And most won’t.
Gilbert & George?
The “CGI experts” in that list stands out. It’s a rather technical subject so you would expect people with maths or engineering degrees.
This is a good example of how art works these days.
Complicated engineering for art projects usually needs someone skilled to do it, or at least help out. A friend of mine is a sculptress and 3D printing has become an enormous aid to her. She is quite happy to ask a metalworker to do welding for her.
The same goes for CGI and the like. The artist storyboards it and the programmer renders it.
Such collaboration can only be a Good Thing.
Pixar worked so well because they had a brilliant creative in charge (John Lasseter) and Dr Ed Catmull, the father of CG. The guy who figured out a lot of early algorithms. And so, when they wanted to do water, straight hair that moved etc, the tools guys would figure it out.
The Pixar shorts were technology tests. Before making a film with a particular technology, make a 5 minute short first.
Of the cited £124bn in economic value, 40% of that comes from “IT, software and computer services” because this includes video gaming (https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/creative-industries-growth-jobs-and-productivity/). Another 17% comes from “Advertising and Marketing”. If you add up Film, TV, radio, photography, publishing, music, performing & visual arts, design and designer fashion you get to $47.9bn. That’s more or less exactly 2% of the UK GVA. But, in 2022-23 (latest figures) we had 150,000 students in UK Universities studying “Design, and creative & performing arts” subjects – ignoring all other arts & humanities subjects – compared to 900,000 students for all the medical, science & engineering disciplines put together (https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/08-08-2024/sb269-higher-education-student-statistics/subjects).
It’s like football, or drug dealing, or a lot of other economic activities. Lots of people do it, some do it to the highest international standards and make a fortune from it, and many do it very well, but not well enough to make a living from it. Pointing to Lionel Messi does not mean that Universities should be teaching students the Cruyff turn. Sure, creative & performing arts degrees may bring intrinsic human value, or give transferable skills usable in other careers, but don’t then bring the economic value of the creative industries into it.
Political success comes from personality, not knowledge. That’s how you get arts degrees at high positions.
Alderman is a shitty writer, tearing into Badenough for what she said, but never quotes her and the context, as if everyone surely already knows what was said. Like Alderman is writing for her chic girlfriends.
Assuming Badenough actually said something to this effect, it has a strong FASCIST stink to it. Schools – non government schools – can have any stupid subject they want. It’s none of the government’s business. Government can place restrictions on GOVERNMENT: none of this shit in government schools, no government loans for specious degrees.
The hidden rip off is all the people who go to university for whom university just isn’t the right use of 4% of their lives.
Exactly.
It is what you get out of a degree, rather than what you learn is important.
I actually had a good job when I decided to go. I didn’t really see it as a risk at the time ( being 19) , but looking back it was a huge one.
Doing History taught me lots of skills that I could apply to my future IT career. Evidence gathering was the most important aspect.
Feminist or Environmental Studies ? Not sure how that would help…
I think that’s how I acquired my slightly odd academic background… I read Physics straight from school and after graduating got a job in “DP” (as “IT” was called in those far-off days). Did same for a few years, but I had a few mates who were lawyers and making loads of dosh without working very hard. I was making good money but working my tits off to do so. Seemed like a good idea, so…
Changed course and read Law as a “mature student”. I couldn’t get a grant for my second stab at academe so did contract-programming etc to provide the finance – during which time I happened-upon “minicomputers”, i.e. those that were merely kitchen-cupboard rather than large-wardrobe size, (specifically DEC PDP 11s)…
By the start of the third year I was so busy with my newly-started OEM business that I should really have signed the visitors’ book at uni on the odd occasions that I turned-up for a lecture or tutorial. Still, I eventually got my LLB, and it taught me one most important lesson, namely to avoid the law and the legal profession like the plague!
Gamecock speaks RSX-11M.
As did I once upon a time. Even wrote a device driver for it – actually for RSX-11T. Then Unix came along…
RT-11 for me, but RSX-11 has an RT-11 implementation layer. 🙂
I wound up on VAX/VMS.
DEC systems from 1977-2009.
“The creative industries add £124bn of value to the UK”
They do this by lumping in anything and everything that can be vaguely considered “creative” like people making accounting software.
And even then, film and TV doesn’t need a degree. James Cameron is a self-taught truck driver who started out on shit like Battle Beyond the Stars. Spielberg shot movies with his pals and hustled his way into a job at Paramount, eventually shooting TV like Columbo. Edgar Wright made a spoof western with his school mates in Wells. Robert Rodriguez did some drug trials and shot a cheap western. Jonathon Glazer shot ads (the famous Guinness one) before going on to make films like Sexy Beast. Ridley Scott did the Hovis ad.
You get a basic job, do it well, you get a better one. Repeat. Eventually, someone is giving you $250m to make Avatar 3.And it’s never been easier to avoid a degree. You have a phone in your pocket. Editing software is free.
I’ve done world tours and hit albums with huge pop stars and I’m fucking self taught. Tell a lie; I had a couple of years of piano lessons when I was a kid. Never did any grades, but knew what scales and arpeggios were.
Yeah, with most things the most training you need is just learning what things are called. I’ve encountered loads of job adverts that mention “pro-task meta-scheduled I/O interaction backgrounding” and I think WTF’s that? and upon reading up discover it’s just what I’ve been doing for decades without giving it a poncy name, in fact without giving it a name AT ALL, it just being…. how I would just natually do it anyway.
True… I’ve been in the industry long enough to have seen several concepts get recycled as “ground-breaking new ideas” – only the name has changed (in some cases, necessarily “to protect the guilty”). 🙂
The bizarre thing is that we had universities because books were so expensive before printing, and over time we replaced classrooms with books because printed books were so much cheaper.
When I was growing up, people became photographers by reading Amateur Photographer. And not just amateurs, but the pros.Beyond that, you might buy a few books or do a weekend course. Like you go out into the country with someone that shoots birds or go into a studio and shoot a different sort of bird. And then you’d get feedback by going to camera clubs.
But the learning really was quite cheap. Amateur Photographer is about £100/year today. That compares with about £9K for university.
Nearly all my training in software is online now, because there’s really good £25-50 courses. A really good person can make money on that because if they can sell 200 copies, that’s £5-10K.
for most of these subjects there are 5 or 6 universities delivering quality education and a couple of hundred offering dosser courses.
Cull it back to the top 10 quality ones and there will be no loss of culture, the rest of the students can start working in coffee delivery 3 years earlier.
Lower birthrates resulting in fewer young people combined with increasing university costs which often requires students to get huge loans is resulting in colleges paring degree offerings and even closing down. There are huge howls from professors of lesbian basket weaving about the unjustness of it all, but they’re just going to have to hustle and make and sell their own baskets.
Too many young people have been stuck with heft student loan obligations, but a solution for that would be for the government to quit guaranteeing them. That’d make banks a bit more circumspect about their lending.
This is something of a self solving problem, though there will be howls as the useless professors are made redundant.
Perhaps universities should charge a cost/profitable fee and leave it to the market? If Jacintha wants a degree in black feminist equity studies and is prepared to pay for it, why not?
Certainly, but if she needs a loan and the government doesn’t guarantee it, likely she’ll have to fall back on free youtube video instruction.
You may notice that Ms Alderman does *not* quote Kemi Badenoch as to what constitutes a “rip-off degree”: she just picks a handful of uneconomic ones – carefully omitting some truly rubbish ones like grievance studies – to suggest, with no hard data, that Mrs Badenoch is attacking culture.
IIRC, that is called “bait and swirch”
They ‘presume’ to know what degrees she’s talking about – but don’t bother to actually find out.
Then write a whole article attacking a stance they totally made up.
Also, art degrees *are* useless. You don’t need a degree to do art, if you’re interested in techniques you just take the appropriate classes to give you the basic grounding.
Art is, to put it crudely, not a profession – its a *trade*.
I mean, the whole point of a LA degree was to align you, culturally, with the elite. But the elite wanted to tear all that cultural alignment down. So the usefulness of an LA degree lies solely in its ability to get you a job teaching an LA subject. And there are just too many LA degree-holders for the number of spots needed for teachers.
And now its 2025, we have ubiquitous internet access – if you just want to learn about the ‘history of art’ – you can just go do that. You can even write papers on it and submit them to journals on your own – and if no one wants to publish them you can just post them on your blog.
Technological upgrades and changing cultural norms have destroyed the point of universities *except* as for job-trainers.
Brad Delong – a university professor but a thinking one – has been very amusing on this for years. Very much along your lines
Precisely. Norman BA Fine Art.
Art is, to put it crudely, not a profession – its a *trade*.
Indeed. Much art is the application of manual skills. You learn them by doing them.
Among the competences I have is that of a manufacturing jeweler working in precious metals. That was learnt at the bench. Some years ago I went to an exhibition of work of that year’s jewelry & design students. I think it was at the ICA. It was a joke. In the entire exhibition I doubt there were more than 3 or 4 pieces worth looking at. Most of it wasn’t even wearable.
Jewelry design is driven by the techniques of making it. The texture of those chain links may be produced by twisting two or three wires together, doubling it over, then twisting it in the other direction, soldering it solid, then pulling it through a draw plate for a ‘D’-shape cross section, winding around a mandrel to produce a ‘spring’, then cutting to free the individual rings. It’s all application of technique. The piece makes itself. And it’s the same throughout. A stone setting looks like that because that’s the way to make a functional & secure stone setting. Depart too far from that & it won’t hold the stone whilst being worn.
The exhibition contained almost no examples of the application of technique. Mostly it was just various materials stuck together. No thought about how it would survive use or what wearing it would do to the wearer or their clothing. The technique was at about the level of evening classes for hobbyists. The colleges obviously don’t have the instructors to teach them or probably even the tools to practice them. And learning what the tools can do & how to use them is the core of the craft.
And a three year university degree course? I had more abilities after a month. One of the pieces I worked on was the repairs to a Byzantine gold necklace for the V&A. It was done by reverse engineering how the original maker made it & finding out what techniques & equipment he had to make it. Last time I went there it was still sitting in their display case, perfect, just as it was originally made in 1200-ish
Personally, I’d reckon it’s a “craft”.
All arts are at base crafts. Take painting. In oil & watercolour, paints are 3-dimensional. Layers of different degrees of transparency built up to get the final effect. Really needs the knowledge of grinding pigments of the right combinations & combining the mediums & the driers & then the brush techniques to apply them. Which brush & how to use it.I’m not a painter but I learnt paints & brush techniques to do paint effects. Woodgrain, marble, tortoishell. That sort of thing. Gives one an insight on how the fabric of Henry VIII’s tunic was rendered to suggest texture, shadow & 3-dimensionality. It’s not art, it’s pure technique. Do this & you will get that result.
A lot of art students can only work in acrylics. Because they’re easy & cheap & you don’t need technique.. But there’s little you can do with them. It’s just flat colour., partly because they’re “open” for such a short period. That means they dry before you get chance to work them. Oil paints can be open for days or even weeks. Depends how much drier you’ve used in them. So you can blend colour into colour.or lift sections of paint off.
>”The UK has some of the best talent in the world in film and television (for the benefit of Badenoch, that’s “performing arts”). Not just actors but producers, lighting experts, directors, camera operators, graphic artists, CGI experts, makeup artists, costume creators, casting mavens.
‘Not just’? The last few years have shown precious little talent in the directors, producers, lighting experts (everything nowadays is barely lit) and casting mavens. Granted its just as bad over here.
And sound engineers !
I can’t bloody hear half of it.
That’s the bloody directors for you. I couldn’t hear half of Oppenheimer in the cinema because the director was being ‘arty’.
It’s a relief to know it’s not just me then. Film I tried to watch recently. Even with adjusting the TV sound settings, half the dialogue was inaudible. I ended up trying to lip read the actors to understand what they were saying.
On telly, this started ages ago. Two very bad culprits were Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SGU, along with shaky hand-cam footage and sudden cuts. Wogan used to rant about it all the time on his wireless show.
It has spread to the movies, where the punter has absolutely no control over volume.
When I was a fresher I realised that, in part, a university was a place that fathers sent their sons to, to study useful subjects, so that the country would flourish enough that their daughters could study The Arts.
That can work if you send only 5% of the cohort to university and your universities adopt standards suitable to that 5%.