I realised this year I’ve been out of university as long as I was a student. It’s also the final year I’ll be living ten minutes’ walk from my alma mater, an accident which I mostly don’t give much thought to, aside from in late September, when clumps of eighteen-year-olds appear out of nowhere, clutching handfuls of Domino’s vouchers and reminding me that reading about the anti-ageing effects of facial massage isn’t the same as doing it.
I studied English Literature along with what felt like hundreds of blonde girls, briefly including me, but spent most of my time writing witty(ish) Facebook posts trying to get other students to come to sketch comedy and improv shows I was involved in. I loved English when I dedicated enough time to it – usually when I had a deadline, because a lot of the course fell under ‘we thought it would be nice for you to know this, but you can forget it immediately unless you want to write an essay about it’ – but having minimal contact hours certainly allowed for my whole schedule to be swamped by student comedy commitments when needed. It also allowed for my fluctuating mental health, which ran the gamut from the soul-destroying – ‘I think the next step is you speaking to your personal tutor.’ ‘You are my personal tutor,’ to the surreal – 12 sessions of NHS CBT in a cupboard-sized room at a charity I would later work for. English definitely left time for a thousand other things, and with mostly essay deadlines rather than exams, it enabled the easier (and more academically subjective) late-night keyboard mash as opposed to trying to learn and then remember a term’s worth of thermodynamics on three hours sleep the next morning.
My cohort was charged £9000 a year in fees, in addition to maintenance loans, and the whole sorry sum was squared away to gain interest and be re-paid gradually after we began earning more than £30 000 p/a. Repayment has since become more punishing. In first year, we marvelled at a friend who had restarted university after some difficulties and as such was still on the £3000 a year rate. While my fees felt extortionate at the time – especially when comparing my minimal humanities contact hours to a friend whose course hours were essentially a full-time job, plus independent study – we were lucky in that not only was it all pre-Covid and in person, the cost of living crisis had not hit and we could afford to eat and use the heating in our poorly insulated eight-person student house, and later, a poorly-insulated mice-infested student flat.
Would I attend university again? I’m not sure. I certainly haven’t used it directly in my career yet, although English as a subject is so broad you really have to teach it or be a writer to argue a direct link; in fact, it seems like the experience gained from extra-curricular activities, plus the credibility of a degree, is what helped most of my friends in their careers. I don’t recall there ever being any alternative to university presented by my (academic, Russell Group-focused) school, even though English in particular has a less clear route to a career than something non-vocational. It also gave me the freedom to navigate my mental health as an independent adult, and receive help and diagnoses. I’m not sure I would have had the self-confidence to advocate for myself and get the help or leeway I would have needed in a work or apprenticeship environment. And of course, I was able to stay out until 2am on a weeknight, sleep until after lunch, and then spend ten hours in a theatre with my friends writing and staging comedy, or plod to the library and write, research and panic through essay after essay on a subject I chose to study because I love it.
Arts degree funding has already been cut by the government, and it’s an easy target for political figures who argue it doesn’t translate to well-paid jobs that contribute to the economy. Obviously, this is ridiculous. There are well-paid jobs to be had, but under-funding has made it a harder sector to join – there are fewer entry-level jobs which are themselves less well paid, and/or which rely on unpaid work experience to get. This leads to the exclusion of those from less wealthy backgrounds and content being produced by those who can afford to take lower-paying jobs or create and fund their own work, and an ultimately more mono-cultural output. See the effect that extortionate rents and venue costs have on performers being able to take shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, who often end up worse off, even if their show has sold out every night. Even if they have representation, they are often in debt to the agency afterwards for their increased publicity and better venue. That’s assuming they have the time and money to support devising and rehearsing material in the first place, often outside full-time careers. To those who say the results of arts investment aren’t tangible, what did we spend all our time doing during Covid? Watching film, TV, animation, and live-streamed performances created and performed by arts graduates. It feels like the same over-confident, under-socialised science students at university who argued that English wasn’t a real subject have become in charge of government policy. My generation is living and working longer, and as such can expect to have so-called portfolio careers, where we have a range of expertise and roles. It’s ridiculous to expect someone to be interested in the same thing at eighteen as they are at forty, whether that be an architect becoming a gardener or a history graduate deciding to re-train as a doctor.
The key element of this debate is what we as a society see university as for. Is it a job that you wouldn’t be able to do without that degree? Is it a reward for hard work, that at its best can give someone from a low-income background a more lucrative career than they would otherwise have had? Is it for credibility, so that high-ranking companies will see that a person can work hard and replicate that work ethic in a corporate environment? Is it for gaining soft skills and life experience in extra-curricular settings that serve you in your career, even if you did a subject just because you liked it at A-level? Is it for lying on the sofa all day drinking and occasionally staying up all night writing an essay, the only time between school and work where you can learn how to be an independent adult with fewer consequences if you struggle? That seems like the kind of comment that would make Rishi Sunak throw his iPad at a wall. How dare good British students (and high fee-paying international students) take a moment in their lives to not put 100% in! Do they not love the economy? Would they prefer to graduate and become Sofa Adults, or even worse, Supposedly-Persecuted Migrants, leeching off the state while other people make the world go round?
Ultimately, less generous loans, quicker repayment, and fewer arts degrees comes down to the devaluing of varied life experience and real people at the expense of numbers on a government spreadsheet – with lower-income people being the first to suffer.
I asked some of my university friends to write about their feelings about their degrees now they’re out in the ‘real world,’ and whether they would attend if they were making the decision now.
Alex, 26, politics graduate & stand-up comedian
It’s been 6 years since I arrived at university and I’m still extraordinarily pleased and grateful I went. For me, university itself ended up giving me the primary reason for why I had wanted to go anyway – to live in a major city and pursue my dream of doing stand-up comedy. I’m from a rural area and I was always jealous of city kids growing up. I am deeply fond and proud of where I am from but at the time it felt like a very stifling, mono-cultural atmosphere, intolerant of difference or experimentation. From a distance, teens from cities seemed much more independent – they weren’t reliant on their parents for transport for instance, and could be at the forefront of culture that I was removed from. I was deeply envious of anyone who grew up in that environment – where it seemed there were countless things to do and be, with opportunity seemingly around every corner. Where you could form your own unique identity – rather than conform to the uniformity of person that surrounded me where I grew up. Going to university was my solution to those frustrations, as it is for hundreds of thousands of students a year, and for me, it gave me the answers. While it was hardly a model for diversity, my horizons were expanded hugely and I was able to pursue my passions in an incredibly supportive environment both within the campus and the city. I had no intention of using my degree, yet the government had effectively subsidised my early years in stand-up, without which I doubt I’d be where I am now.
In hindsight, I was very lucky to go at the time I did. Obviously it doesn’t compete with those who went for free with government grants, but I was part of the last cohort not to have their education undisturbed by COVID or the cost of living crisis. Had I spent most of my degree remotely I doubt I would see the university experience positively at all. How we organise education in this country is a total mess and universities are perhaps the most stark example of a institutionally flawed system rather than merely underfunded. Successive governments have tried to square the interests of universities, private interests, government targets and the country’s finances in a way that have persistently put students last. A UK university degree has become so devalued –it’s probably more financially prudent to pursue almost any other form of vocational higher education than most degrees. To be a student now is basically to be an inelastic consumer, beholden to the cultural expectations of your parents’ generation to attend, be ‘academically challenged’, reap the inevitable rewards of this ‘elite’ education in your future workplace and have the ‘best years of your life’ as a by-product. Disappointment in the reality is likely. Low contact hours, tumbling academic standards and a tumultuous economic future is the reality of UK students. Three years after graduating I know that I got extraordinarily lucky. The debt I accrued doesn’t particularly bother me – it’s only phrased like that so governments don’t have to add the black hole that is UK university spending to the deficit. It basically functions as a graduate tax that only applies if you earn enough and ends in 30 years. I know I will never pay it back in full. But that money doesn’t come from nowhere. As the financial, mental health and productivity crows come home to roost and the economy continues to buckle under a number of factors, not least a mountain of unpaid student debt. I can’t imagine our cultural imagination about what it means to go to university won’t change hugely over the next decade.
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NB: I wrote most of this article several years ago, prior to the cost-of-living crisis. Since then, things have unfortunately got a lot worse. Universities are cutting arts degrees and cost-of-living expenses have meant that many are working more than they are studying in order to fund their lives.