The government recently froze university creative arts course funding, a small real terms cut.
Outrage! Gordon McKenzie, GuildHE universities and college group chief executive, said: “The Department for Education repeatedly makes funding decisions that damage the creative talent pipeline on which those industries depend.” The University lecturers’ trade union went further, saying “The government's assault (sic) on the arts is already having a devastating impact on creative courses, and risks turning higher education into an arid desert”, while Armando Iannucci described it as “the highest level of economic self-harm.”
Some facts. Creative arts have not been singled out. Humanities courses, such as history, get no government support. The fees freeze means the same real terms funding cut as creative arts for these courses.
There are 127,000 creative arts students. That’s more than engineering. Double the number of medics. Three times physics. Five times as many as maths. Students in England are a third more likely to study creative arts as in Scotland, and 50% more likely than in Northern Ireland. Claims of an arid desert are demonstrably untrue.
The government’s reason is employment outcomes. The ever-excellent Institute for Fiscal Studies have calculated returns to individuals and taxpayers by subjects and university.
https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/What-is-a-degree-worth.pdf
Economics and medicine students are good news for everyone. They earn a lot, repay their student loans, and pay a lot of tax. They fund our schools, pensions and so on. In contrast, creative arts’ graduate outcomes are uniquely awful. The average male creative arts graduate earns about £100,000 less than if they had never gone to university, and costs taxpayers about the same. For a woman, a creative arts degree lowers lifetime earnings a fraction and costs the taxpayer about £50,000. Given the gender ratio, the average taxpayer loss per student is £68,000, or about £2.9bn a year.
I think £2.9bn is a lot of money. I think a government is within their rights to say “hang on, can we afford this?” Sadly, having half-asked the question, the government made the wrong choice. It shaved the subsidy a fraction, but left demand untouched. Costs will fall a tiny bit, and the same number of students will be taught a little less well.
The government should instead have limited student numbers. It already limits medicine and dentistry numbers, because of cost. Limiting access to expensive courses is reasonable, but it is creative arts, not medicine, that cost the taxpayer a fortune in the long term. Creative arts courses should be capped - perhaps by (say) three quarters, saving taxpayers £2.2bn every year.
We should then make the remaining courses outstanding beacons of excellence. Creative arts currently get a government grant of £16.7m a year. We could - and should - literally multiply that figure by 10, while still saving £2bn a year overall.
Furthermore, we should accept that creative arts graduates very rarely pay their loans back. We should reduce their course fees to £3,000 a year, with government paying the difference to their university or college. That is costless, since the money is never paid back.
Of course some will complain. But they are complaining already. They don’t complain more about Scotland, even though Scottish number controls mean that Scottish students are much less likely to take creative arts courses.
My proposal creates real winners. The most talented students will still do the courses they want to do. Their student fees, loans and debts will fall dramatically. They will take courses that are significantly better funded, with more and better quality teaching.
We cannot, as a nation, afford to have unlimited creative arts students. Neither our economy, nor our cultural sector require it. What we need instead is excellent provision, for a sensible number of students, properly funded and supported.
There are a few issues with the average rate of return estimates for creative arts courses.
First, creative arts are ones with a different distribution of returns - a tiny number become rich and famous (but often not within the LEO data timescales), while many make a living principally outside creative arts - but may teach creative arts. Whether being more selective at entry to HE courses would identify the high-flyers better is possible, but could simply miss potential.
Secondly, and potentially more significant, LEO data has so far underweighted self-employed income - and people who make their living in creative arts are self-employed in high proportions, as we saw during COVID. In particular, it seems from various such discussions on Radio 3 that arts organisations have encouraged artists to use business structures that are politely called tax-efficient, such as personal limited companies where the artist is paid minimum wage through PAYE (which gets recorded in LEO) and also receives dividends. This affects the taxpayer returns in the IFS chart.
There are a number of other measurement issues that Charlie Ball of JISC picked up in a Twitter thread you may have seen (https://twitter.com/lmicharlie/status/1777644712175841595).
I'd think the self-employment income issues would also apply to the male non-graduate (trades) base in the calculations using LEO, though whether these are more significant than for creative arts graduates is hard to identify.