Tuesday 25th March 2014 - Careers, or content? What should drive learning?

There is, rightly, a great deal of emphasis placed today on the careers and other opportunities that students will open up to students as a result of undertaking their degree studies.  That has probably always been true for many students.  I was given no careers advice at my school, and ended up applying to study Geography rather than History at university (I liked History equally well) because my father told me that if I did a Geography degree there would be two jobs open to me - either as a cartographer or a teacher - whilst if I did a History degree I could only become a teacher.  

I am very keen that we should do everything we can to enhance the skills of our students for entry into the labour market - and should see those skills as in part generic and not simply related to their discipline.  I have today taken part in a conference panel to answer questions on how we might do that.

But we should also retain a broader view of what university education, particularly in a research-intensive university, should be about.  Helping our stduents succeed in getting jobs is important but it is only part of the task, just as working for a living will only be part of students' future lives.  We should be exciting students about their disciplines, about wider questions related to them, and about the application of research to the wider world.  We should be doing that in whatever subject a student is taking. We should be inspiring students in such a way that once they have completed their formal studies they will want to continue developing their understanding and thinking about their subject for many years to come.  Educating students for a future career is a functionalist aspect of a university: broadening students' intellectual horizons in many other ways and enhancing their general education.

Last semester some of the students in my final year class chose to write their projects as comparative studies of the (re)generation of national identities in two states of Central or Eastern Europe since the end of Communism.  Several of them chose the Ukraine as one of their comparisons.  The project task was in part to give students experience of comparative methods in social scientific analysis.  I haven't checked back with them, but I sincerely hope that those students have been watching recent events in the Ukraine with the benefit of the research they did for their oprojects, and will retain an interest in how developments might unfold over the coming months and years.  In other words, I hope they will retain an interest in the subject matter they dealt with as well as in the skills development they underwent.

In post-graduation surveys it is very reasonable to ask questions along the lines of 'Did your degree studies help you to secure the job you now hold?'  The answers may include reference both to disciplinary knowledge and also to generic graduate skills that were honed during study.  But another valid question might be 'Do you envisage over the coming years maintaining an interest in the subject(s) you have studied?'