I’m listening to my son and his friends making their final decisions about where and what to study at university. Mostly, I keep quiet; on the rare occasions when teenagers want your opinion, they’ll ask for it. But after 25 years of university teaching across several countries, there are some things I want to say.
The first is that you don’t have to go to university. Even if you’d be the first person in your family for several generations to decide against it, that decision is possible. There are many paths towards happy and successful adult life. Not all of them require a degree and very few of them require that you begin a degree at the age of 18. If there isn’t a subject you long to study, preferably at an institution you’d be excited to join, do something else. Ideally do something else you long to do in a place or with people you find exciting, but if you don’t know yourself and your opportunities well enough to see what that might be, take time to find out.
You probably need to earn some money while you do this. Figure it out. You will probably always need to earn some money so figuring it out is as useful as anything your peers are learning in the first term at university.
If you’re full of uncertainty, try writing down three things you’ve enjoyed in the past, three things you’d like to try, three things you’d like to know more about. Where would you like to go? Who would you like to meet? If these questions are scary – for some 18-year-olds, they are – start at the other end: what have you not enjoyed, where do you not want to go, who do you not want to meet? What does that leave, which way does it point?
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For your own sake, with respect for whoever is paying your fees and supporting you, for the sake of your classmates and teachers, don’t take a degree to which you’re not committed. You’ll spend several years and a lot of money and lost opportunity being a bit bored, mildly frustrated and slightly resentful. You’ll teach yourself to work halfheartedly, without curiosity or energy. The results won’t be great. If you’re going to do that, you might as well get paid and go to university later – if at all – when you know more about yourself and the world.
If you can, do a degree you love. And also, some students have very understandable reasons for committing to maximising earning potential at any cost. If you’ve known poverty and danger, if your family is relying on you to be the one who makes it, if you long for security and prosperity more than anything, you may want to be canny about your decisions. I teach literature and creative writing and we tend to attract students from financially secure backgrounds. I wish it wasn’t so. The others often have the best stories to tell and the best readings to offer and I love to celebrate all perspectives and all voices in my classroom, but there’s no point pretending that studying the arts isn’t a braver choice for some than others. The injustice is the problem, not individual responses to it.
It’s not true that arts degrees are hobby courses or luxuries. Previous students of mine have glittering careers in finance, law and business. You can argue that corporations want critical thinkers, creative intelligence and trained storytellers, but I suspect it’s more that people who follow their energies and curiosities are good to have around. Other ex-students include members of the secret services, owners of a microbrewery, a travelling puppeteer, a professional folk singer, teachers and writers. If you love history or literature or philosophy and your situation allows you to do what delights you, do it; following healthy delight rarely leads to misery.
[ Arts: A broad degree with skills highly sought after in the workforceOpens in new window ]
That said, remembering my immigrant, refugee and working-class grandparents, it’s obvious why some people longing to study literature or music turn instead to medicine, engineering, law. Not everyone gets to follow their energies and curiosities, which is a shame but not your individual shame. Just know why you’re doing what you’re doing and be as sure as you can be that the motivation will see you through.
If you don’t know or you’re not sure, go have adventures on whatever scale works for you; lockdown was hard, life is long and education always available.
