Humanities are not the problem
On the 19th of June 2020, the Morrison Government announced sweeping changes to the structure of Commonwealth funding for university degrees as a part of its plan to reform the tertiary education sector. Amongst fee decreases in areas such as agriculture, nursing, and teaching, the Coalition has also controversially proposed effective fee increases of 113% to the cost of humanities subjects. These increased fees would place courses such as history, philosophy, sociology, and political science in a higher funding band than medicine and dentistry — making a humanities education the most expensive in terms of per-subject cost alongside law and economics. According to the Prime Minister, these funding changes are designed to encourage students to join more employable industries to help drive the post-COVID-19 recovery efforts.
The state of graduate employability
Reform to the tertiary education sector is undoubtedly needed, with graduate employability failing to recover from a dramatic drop in graduate employment rates after the GFC.
Students graduating from university programs are experiencing average employment rates of 5.8 percentage points less than graduates of vocational programs despite the significantly higher cost incurred by studying a bachelors degree.[ii] On top of a decreased likelihood to secure full-time paid employment after leaving university, the average undergraduate median starting salary as a share of male average weekly earnings has fallen by almost 10 percentage points since 2007.[iii]
Will Morrison’s reforms fix tertiary education?
The short answer to this question is a resounding no. Although the logic of encouraging university graduates to obtain more employable skills to boost employment rates is certainly sound, simply funnelling humanities graduates into degrees in other fields will likely not come close to achieving the policy’s goals.
According to the most recent census data available on labour market outcomes, unemployment rates for graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields are often no better, or are in some cases worse than those with degrees in humanities. According to James Bishop and Rochelle Guttmann in an article published for the RBA in 2018, “despite having higher earnings on average, the unemployment rates of economics and STEM graduates tend to be higher than for people with other types of degrees”.[v]
These findings are consistent with findings from other studies, with the director of the Grattan Institute’s higher education program also stating that “there has been a massive escalation in the number of science students without any corresponding increase in the number of jobs that actually require a science degree”.[vi] Although STEM graduates can expect a marginally higher average income if they are able to find a degree in their field, there remains a much larger number of graduates already in this area than there are jobs.
Even looking at graduate outcomes more generally, the AAGE employer survey recently found that the average ratio of graduates to graduate jobs in Australia sits at around 33 to 1.[vii] This daunting ratio of jobseekers to available jobs heavily suggests that the issues with graduate employment rates do not stem from a lack of qualified graduates, but rather from a lack of jobs.
The cost of the decline in humanities
On top of a general lack of jobs in the economy, the dramatically increased cost of humanities subjects further undermines the competitiveness of newer generations of graduates as they enter the workforce. These funding changes not only make majoring in humanities subjects an untenable proposition, but newer students will also be discouraged from taking up study in areas such as philosophy and history as electives or minors as well.
By removing the ability for students studying STEM subjects to diversify their studies in favour of narrower specialisation in the cheaper science and technology subjects, graduates will become less capable of dealing with the rapidly changing and fast-paced nature of the 21st-century knowledge economy.
As David Epstein argues in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, the pursuit of strict and early specialisation is not the only path to success. As Gunpei Yokoi, the founder of the toy and game branch of Nintendo discovered, it was his generalist approach to working that allowed him to revolutionise the video game market by making connections between disparate fields which narrow technical specialists in these areas couldn’t see. Yokoi was able to apply this inter-disciplinary approach which he called “lateral thinking with withered technology” to his machine maintenance job, and as a result, he revolutionised a gaming industry which is now worth more than $116 billion per year.[ix]
By making it harder for Australian students to study across disciplines, we are at risk of replacing flexible and laterally-thinking innovators like Gunpei Yokois with a generation of replacable cogs in a failing economic machine. Instead of increasing the cost of humanities degrees, more serious educational and economic reform is required to lift the country out of its COVID-induced economic slump.
Louis Altena is an angry humanities student in his final year of a Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics (Honours). In his spare time, Louis enjoys long walks on the beach and applying for graduate jobs.
References
[i] Anna Patty, “Not enough jobs for science graduates challenges STEM hype,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 14, 2019.
[ii] Conor Duffy, “University fees to be overhauled, some course costs to double as domestic student places boosted,” ABC News, June 19, 2020.
[iii] Anna Patty, “Not enough jobs for science graduates,” April 14, 2019.
[iv] James Bishop and Guttmann, Rochelle, “Does It Pay To Study Economics?” Australian Economy, September 20, 2018.
[v] Ibid,.
[vi] Anna Patty, “Not enough jobs for science graduates,” April 14, 2019.
[vii] Jaymes Carr, “What are the odds of getting a graduate job?” GradAustralia, 2019.
[viii] Deanna Pate, “The Skills Companies Need Most in 2020 — And How to Learn Them,” Linkedin Learning, January 13, 2020.
[ix] Teodora Dobrilova, “How Much Is The Gaming Industry Worth?” TechJury, June 10, 2020.
