How higher education learned to stop worrying about disciplines and love generic competencies
We will begin with the official story. A bright-eyed young person is seized by a passion for a specific subject — it could be anything from law to literature, fashion to criminology, computing to business administration — and chooses to study it at university, with a view to paid employment in an associated industry. Such a direct career path is vanishingly rare. The first position after graduation is most likely to be in hospitality, retail, administration, or a call centre. All of these disparate disciplines will, however, have adequately prepared the graduate for such jobs.
In the past few days, we have seen both leading economists (Roger Bootle in The Telegraph) and recent graduates (Nicholas Stephenson in The Critic) lament the undergraduate degree’s inability to secure young people a foothold in their chosen career. Partly this has to do with the jobs market itself — a struggling economy as well as the rise of AI. But it also has to do with the interchangeability of many of the “graduate competencies” (to use the correct HE corporate jargon) with which these jobseekers pass on to the job market. Employers, like Orwell’s farm animals, can look from arts grad CV to law résumé, from sociology transcript to literature degree details, and find numerous elements which make it “impossible to say which was which.”
This leads us to transferable skills. These are generic proficiencies that can be applied to a range of jobs, from junior shop manager to civil service administrator. Progressively, universities have embedded these within their courses — ironically, given the huge number of graduates on welfare benefits — in the name of employability. Despite the official doxa, most universities merrily admit to themselves that the majority of students within any given discipline will never practise in that field. Let me clarify how this has happened, using as an example a discipline I taught, developed curricula, and acted as external examiner for over many years — Creative Writing.
Universities across the sector offer much the same spread of subjects. Once one university conceived of an undergraduate course in Creative Writing and demonstrated that there was a market for such a course, many others followed suit. Until recently, dozens of post-92s and redbricks across the country were offering Bachelor’s degrees in Creative Writing, either as single honours or in combination with such aligned subjects as English Literature or Journalism. The ostensible carnival bark for these degrees announced that any young person aspiring to be a poet, or a novelist, or a scriptwriter, or any associated form of imaginative writing would find this the ideal degree choice.
The institutions liked Creative Writing because, aside from staffing costs, it was relatively cheap to deliver. However, courses have to attract far more than the handful of applicants armed with brilliant portfolios to be viable. As more students signed up, the obvious truth became clear: only a very small proportion would ever become professional writers. Academics knew this from the start; I recall one lecturing me that the purpose of a CW degree “for some students” is that they discover they are not writers. But even if we accept that a few grads (mostly those with family connections) will go into associated fields like publishing and copywriting, many would inevitably yield to the clarion call of Tesco. As fees rose to £9,000 and beyond, the cracks in the edifice of delivering a degree in a discipline into which most graduates will neither progress nor earn a penny began to show.
Enter transferable skills. The Complete University Guide lists “skills in creative writing to the standards required by the industry —- whether publishing, film and TV, or for web content online” and “editing, redrafting and proofreading” as the career-specific proficiencies associated with a Creative Writing degree (never to be used again by most graduates). Alongside these sit a long list of all-purpose transferable skills: “communication, creative thinking and analysis, digital skills, negotiation, planning, presentation, prioritising and time management, and problem solving.” Universities are pretty open about this, and to a large extent transferable skills exist to reassure everyone that it’s not the end of the world if the industry the student has been studying to enter doesn’t welcome them.
Universities find transferable skills are particularly useful on Open Days. Coy and embarrassed wannabe writers often sit in Trappist silence, while parents glower and occasionally ask whether this degree will get their offspring a job. The perky academic — themselves a published or performed writer of at least some repute — then lists the transferable skills to reassure the parents, while winking at the wannabe to suggest that a budding Stephen King or Sally Rooney is in da house. The academic may list the graduates who have been published — impressive, but only if you don’t ask the cohort per capita.
The real issues begin when recruitment succeeds and academics are faced with decent-sized classes. It soon becomes clear who has talent — a reality that senior management in universities are often reluctant to acknowledge. Many degrees, if they were doing what the title claims, would be about refining the already gifted — in reality, a small fraction of the class. The best we can hope is that the majority grasp the transferable skills. So, rather than spending too much time on the finer points of aesthetics, classes focus on group work, presentation skills, and exercises aimed more at solving problems than producing sublime villanelles. Eventually, as pressure mounts to improve KPIs for pass rates and good (2:1 or above) degrees, the emphasis shifts from green-housing the next generation of promising writers to ensuring proficiency in the generics.
This is dispiriting for academics, who have spent lifetimes developing their own creative voices and a passion for passing on the tricks of the trade, only to find themselves stranded teaching elementary skills only tangentially linked to imaginative writing. It is also disheartening for genuinely gifted students, left spending hours on anything but honing language in exquisite ways or gripping an audience with the craft of storytelling. Many students, in sundry post-92s at least, have been so let down by their primary education that they do not know what a paragraph is or how to use a comma correctly. The elevated pursuit of fine poesy and sublime prose is replaced by hours of compensatory toil. The pursuit of high pass rates, good grades and employability inevitably turns BA Creative Writing into BA Transferable Skills.
Do we need hundreds of universities offering the same menu of courses, each churning out students with varieties of BA/BSc Transferable Skills?
Creative Writing and other arts-based subjects are but extreme examples of this phenomenon. Passion and flair are essential in all subjects, although it is heresy to acknowledge this under our dogma of mandated equity. The transferable skills for Computer Science, Business, and countless other degrees are much the same — communication, teamwork, problem solving, project management, and so on. To list examples would be as tedious as it is to teach them. How many Computing graduates go on to innovate in industry or specialise in emerging tech? How many Business grads lead corporate strategy or drive innovation in their fields? We are left with thousands of graduates from disparate subjects all with the same generic skills. “Do a nice display for the biscuits, Mark, and get the team to instigate your decision. I know you can do it, kid. I’ve seen your transcript!”
My imaginary Mark is lucky — his degree has helped to secure a job in a stable industry, supermarket retail. Yes, it’s a long way from his faint dream of becoming a games designer, but what the hell — even he would admit his passion for that was watery at best, based on the vague notion that he enjoyed playing GTA. My question for Mark, and for those who put him through BA Games Design (transferable skills: you know the score), would be: did it really need three years and a debt of £53,000 to get him onto a Retail Graduate Leadership Scheme?
Do we need hundreds of universities offering the same menu of courses, each churning out students with varieties of BA/BSc Transferable Skills? If we decide there is a genuine need to train undergraduate-age students in these generics, a much cheaper one-year Certificate would surely make more sense? A leaner cadre of universities could work with those who have real enthusiasm and talent for any given discipline. A degree in a specific subject might then recover its meaning and its worth.
