What degree should you choose?

Thursday, 11 January, 2007

This question has been posed to me in a variety of guises by, several different people, over the last couple of weeks and remains a perennial problem for students taking A-levels. It started out with a discussion on how best to recruit students and I mentioned that my wife (Middlesex University) had had considerable success in engaging six formers through the organisation of a revision conference. These are very popular and actually make money!! She had organised some lunchtime sessions, the most popular of which were on how to select a degree. This was then followed by a query from my niece as she was bewildered by the vast choice of degrees and locations. And from the discussion with her, the point was made that actually very few careers (and at the time we could only think of medicine) require you to take a degree in the particular subject area. Law, teaching and accountancy are all good examples of where you can cross-train with a conversion course (although if there are other careers then let me know). Indeed it reminded of a Steve Wright (in the afternoon) joke about how many DJs actually have a media studies degree. Or (in reverse), what careers does a sports science degree actually lead on to and how directly relevant is the academic content of the degree (and the sterotype is of people becoming PE teachers, which I am sure is both unfair and not true). Actually, my wife made the point that many vocational degrees need academic content to be validated at degree level, yet much of it is of little use to the career then pursued.

So thinking about this question got me pondering the poor recruitment that geography has seen over the last 6 or 7 sever years in HE. Geography went from very high numbers in the mid-1990s to a low in 2003/4 with a gradual rise since then. This is directly attributable to the drop in numbers of students taking geography at GCSE and A-level, a result of the introduction of more vocational style subjects at GCSE and A-level (business studies for example).

This somewhat rambling series of thoughts brings me back to the original question of what degree should you actually choose? Well in my experience most employers are concerned with the classification (grade) of your degree, not specifically the subject that it is in. First and foremost then you want to select a degree that you are good at and, perhaps more importantly, that you enjoy as a subject (and these both held true when I studied geography as an undergraduate). I also think, with my lecturers hat now on, that it is more beneficial to study academic rather than vocational subjects. This was partly why geography was so successful as a subject; it combined together science and social science and introduced students to a broad range of skills and experiences that were invaluable in the workplace. Vocational subjects have their place but not, in my opinion, at degree level. No doubt I stand to be corrected on this point!

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