Are There Too Many Arts Graduates?

The score for the double bass of Sir James MacMillians Stabat Mater is pictured prior to the British composer Harry Christophers conducting in a concert live streamed for the first time from the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican on April 22, 2018. Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

I can vividly remember the afternoon of my university graduation ceremony, not least of all because I got lost on the way to pick up my academic robes.

I had hired them out from the University of Queensland (UQ)—for not an insignificant sum, I might add—and spent more than an hour desperately trekking across St Lucia in search of the rotten things.

Eventually, I found the pick-up point: a dank, underground carpark that was airless and steaming with body heat as hundreds of adolescent students milled around in queues. It was a concrete end—literally and figuratively—to my days as an undergraduate.

UQ kindly awarded me a Bachelor of Music (Hon I) and a Bachelor of Arts, with respective majors in composition, history, and writing.

I mistakenly used the wrong hand to doff my cap to the Chancellor, but I’m sure he didn’t notice. After all, how could he? I was one student in a sea of hundreds receiving their humanities degrees.

Front entrance to the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, on Jan. 12, 2021. Daniel Teng/The Epoch Times

I use my graduation story as a broad springboard for this article’s artistic ponderance. The sheer volume of tertiary students graduating with arts qualifications has always concerned me. Leaving me wondering now if we are beginning to pay the price for this mass of supposed creativity.

First, I must begin with an important caveat. Throughout this, do not misinterpret my position; I certainly do not think that the practice or consumption of art should be reserved for an elite few.

Art is the highest form of human expression and should be made widely available, if not for the purposes of entertainment, then for its excellent neurological benefits.

Artists, too, generally want their creations to be experienced by as many people as possible. So, I am not proposing restrictions of any nature; I am simply ruminating on a theme.

Damaged by Commercialisation of Education

A three-year Bachelor of Arts at an Australian public university costs the student A$36,810 (US$24,733) in course fees—by no means the most expensive degree, but not at all the cheapest either.

The student is also charged other dues: they must pay compulsory amenities fees to the student union, buy prescribed textbooks and equipment from the university shop, and so on.

I roughly calculate that my alma mater of more than 55,000 students draws well over a collective $10 million annually in compulsory amenities fees.

I am not necessarily suggesting tertiary education should be free, even though it once was in this country. My point in raising these fiscal matters is to conclusively establish that universities today are money-making machines.

They have a commercial stake in the sale of education and, more often than not, profit handsomely from it.

Thus, I think I may comfortably assert that universities, intent on maximising their revenue, accept as many full fee-paying students as they can.

When in my final days of high school, I can remember university ambassadors billing humanities degrees as “preliminary degrees.”

In other words: “Study music until you realise you’re actually destined to study psychiatry.”

Well, some may say the music world is rich with patients requiring mental status examinations, but this deceptive messaging from universities to prospective students is ultimately, I think, damaging.

Undertaking a Bachelor of Arts simply to “kill time” is neither academically genuine nor financially responsible—particularly as Australia suffers a cost-of-living crisis.

Moreover, many today who enrol in Bachelor of Arts programmes seem to harbour ill-conceived fantasies as to what is required to succeed in the creative industries.

The reality is a field like music is extremely gruelling. Success demands hours upon hours of disciplined daily practice, as well as a healthy dose of natural talent and irrational obsession.

An employee sorts a display of vintage guitars in a shop on Denmark Street in London, England, on April 20, 2011. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

It really does seem to me that so many students who are accepted into humanities degrees today should never have undertaken their studies, to begin with. They commence as mediocrities and conclude disillusioned and bitter, with limited employment prospects and sizeable student debts.

On both counts, the universities are entirely to blame.

Chasing the accumulation of wealth, they frequently enrol students who are not necessarily likely to succeed in the arts. They then fail in their expected duty to provide an appropriate level of education to those already disadvantaged students.

The result of all of this is disastrous.

Amidst an ever-contracting arts industry in Australia, there becomes an oversupply of Bachelor of Arts graduates, and genuine aptitude within that oversupply can often be difficult to discern.

The ultimate potential of Australia’s creative sectors is adversely affected.

Additionally, those students who do suffer to no professional avail through their humanities degrees don’t just habitually end up working for the government or corporate bureaucracies. Heartbreaking, they display prejudice towards the arts for life.

Tertiary education must abandon its commercial preoccupations and return to its traditional charter: the advancement of knowledge.

In a fragmented and uncertain world, we must do all that we can to protect the arts and humanities against those ideologues who would seek selfishly to debase them. The universities should be honour bound to aid us in this noble and vital quest.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.