Keen to be the next Prime Minister? Or perhaps a new job as an anthropologist, policy analyst, journalist, linguist, social worker or graphic designer? Career is a question crossing the minds of thousands of HSC students at present.
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According to an Illawarra academic, choosing a Bachelor of Arts can get you any of the above – or a schmick role at Google or Amazon.
Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (Head of School of Humanities and Social Inquiry) said seven of the past nine Australian PM’s had completed a BA, while businesses like Google and Amazon wanted arts graduates on their workforce because of their “soft skills”.
Skills like critical and analytical thinking, cultural awareness and competency, communication and interpersonal skills – the skills needed to solve the increasing array of complex public policy issues such as climate change, obesity or entrenched Indigenous disadvantage.
“The ability to look at problem from multiple directions and think through what a product looks like or what a social problem looks like from the perspective of different people, different sorts of social questions, principles of social justice, ethics, empathy,” Professor Probyn-Rapsey said. “It’s a really interesting in time to walk out the door with an arts degree.”
This differs from 10 or 20 years ago because tech giants weren’t the biggest companies in the world, she said. While there also weren’t multinational corporations that relied heavily on people skills to make them operational.
A recent study by Deloitte Access Economics titled The Value of the Humanities, commissioned by Macquarie University, found people with an undergraduate humanities degree can expect to earn a lifetime earnings premium of $200,000 over a high school graduate. If you study humanities with law, you can expect a $270,000 premium.
And here’s where Deloitte identifies an even bigger “dividend” for society from the study of humanities.
“The value of humanities-educated individuals is more than the money they make and the goods and services they produce,” said the authors of the report. “It is about the problems they help solve ... The need to address such complex problems is expected to rise in the future.”
Professor Probyn-Rapsey said the uptake of arts and humanities degrees at a tertiary level was seeing a decline nationally and internationally though UOW was “maintaining its market share”.
“Students are being encouraged to choose more vocational degrees. but we’re maintaining a good level of interest from students in traditional disciplines and newer disciplines like media and communications, graphic design, music, visual arts, performance,” she said.
“We’re still seeing a lot of [popularity] around the traditional disciplines, so English, history, politics, philosophy and international studies … and really strong interest in Indigenous studies.”
Other areas of interest for study under humanities which are gaining popularity include feminism and gender.
The latest statistics from the Australian Government’s Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching data showed 82.6 per cent of UOW graduates from humanities, culture and social sciences programs were employed within four months of completing their course.
THIS GUY GOT A JOB ALREADY
Jake Dempsey, 26, will have completed a Bachelor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong at the end of 2018 but is one of the lucky ones to have already secured a job.
The graphic designer/photographer said he felt like it was a “mixed bag” when it came to BA graduates getting a job straight out of university.
“I knew a girl … who spent the whole year not finding any work,” he said. “I just didn’t think that would happen, I always thought there was lots of jobs in graphic design.”
When Mr Dempsey first left high school he admitted all he wanted to do was surf. Even when he began studying at TAFE – his pathway to getting into a BA – he was still focused on catching the perfect wave rather than thinking about his career.
“Seeing people not get work made me really work harder at uni to produce things like holographic vegetable boxes, things that make you stand out when you look at your resume,” he said.
His passion and drive to one day be able to work as a successful freelance graphic designer and surf as much as he can, has propelled him to gain as much work experience as he possibly can.
Mr Dempsey now also mentor’s TAFE students to help them head on the right direction and inspire them to become more focused.
“It’s really up to you to make sure your work is good enough otherwise you’re going to be left with nothing after uni,” he said. “You’ve got to be hireable.”
A NEW ARTS DEGREE FOR 2020
There are currently 24 different majors a Bachelor of Arts students can choose, with a multitude of minor subjects available to compliment – including those from other faculties such as sciences.
UOW academics are currently reviewing the BA and how to refine it to better position students for future careers, with the new curriculum set to be launched in 2020.
“The next generation is going to have more than one career, they’re going to have more than one job and be moving around a bit more than previous generations,” Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey said.
She said career pathways will become less linear and more “networked” so students will need to be better prepared on how workplaces operate, work culture, policies around sexual harassment and equity, ethics, and getting them prepared to sell themselves to an employer.
“A lot of students come out of university with a degree but don’t necessarily have a good sense to explain that to the wider world,” Professor said.
HOW MANY ARE ACTUALLY DOING IT
Enrollment numbers for singular degree in a Bachelor of Arts have dropped at UOW, though numbers for other humanities degrees or double degrees have increased.
The standalone BA program fell 442 places from 1,443 in 2013 to 1,001 in 2018.
The University of Wollongong has adapted their arts and humanities degrees over the years with some subjects taken in the Bachelor of Arts now offered as standalone degrees.
These include the Bachelor of International Relations, Bachelor of Journalism and the Bachelor of Communications and Media.
Enrolments in the Bachelor of International Studies grew 224 places from 282 to 506 while enrolments in the Bachelor of Journalism also grew 57 places from 171 in 2013 to 228 in 2018. The Bachelor of Communications and Media remained popular over the period, with 833 enrolments in 2018 compared to 882 in 2013.
BA enrollments accounted for approximately 5 per cent of total student enrollments in 2017.
Meantime, the latest statistics from the Australian Government’s Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching data showed that 82.6 per cent of graduates from UOW’s humanities, culture and social sciences programs were employed within four months of completing their course.
It comes as UOW was ranked ranked in the 176-200 band in the 2019 Times Higher Education World University Rankings rankings by arts and humanities subjects.
In the overall rankings announced earlier this year, UOW was named among the world’s top 250 universities, and among the top 10 universities in Australia