The Conservatives have announced that they want to reduce the number of university places by 100,000.
They say they’ll do this by targeting the courses where students have had poor earning outcomes. When asked for examples, Kemi Badenoch singled out creative arts. Was this fair?
It’s true that some creative arts graduates don’t appear to earn a significant graduate premium, but the UK’s creative industries are worth £125bn a year or, to put it another way, more than £1 in every £20 in the UK economy – a larger proportion of the nation’s wealth than almost any other country on earth.
Meanwhile, in 2023/24, the creative sector grew four times faster than the economy as a whole and is one of the government’s eight target sectors in the industrial strategy.
So how can graduates be earning so little in a sector that’s worth so much and doing so well?
A health warning
Before I attempt to answer that, a tangential health warning is required about any graduate premium data. To say they’re “problematic” is like describing Marmite as “not to everyone’s taste.”
Firstly, any useful data is inherently subject to massive time lags so past trends aren’t hugely reliable as future indicators. Secondly, and more importantly, it relies on aggregation, so it never tells you what might have been for any individual.
The lowest graduate earners tend to live in parts of the country where earnings are lowest and come from backgrounds where they would have earned far less than the national median had they not gone to university.
I’m not saying this is right or fair, but when they earn the national median wage, that might represent a significant premium personally, but it’s not the story the data will tell.
Subsidising success
Let’s return to that question about the supposed poor returns for creative arts graduates. The answer lies in the fact that they are effectively subsidising the creative industries that they’re working in – they are, as a matter of choice, selling their labour for less than they might earn in other sectors.
That allows the owners of creative industries to make more money – for themselves and for the economy – because they have cheap, highly skilled, highly motivated workers. For more than two-thirds of creative roles, you’re expected to have a degree, compared to 26 per cent of all jobs.
Why are creative graduates willing to do this? It’s because – and this is a critical point for all graduates and, indeed, any human being – money isn’t necessarily the only reward from work.
These are industries that are very attractive to people to work in. Not only can they be creative, but it is a high-profile field and the UK’s output is respected both in this country and around the world.
There is a lot of competition for these jobs, which allows some employers to operate dodgy employment practices – such as unpaid internships – and it depresses the entry salaries of the whole sector.
Sometimes, this kind of labour market anomaly is regarded as a failure of careers advice – if only school-leavers had been given better information about the jobs that are easiest to get into. But that doesn’t wash. Students going into creative arts courses, hoping for a career, are perfectly aware that this isn’t the best choice if all they want is a financial return.
When they choose to invest in their higher education, it’s not just a matter of the debt they take on – it’s also their time, effort, and dedication that they’re investing.
Who benefits most?
This leaves them open to what some would call exploitation in work and what others might call the labour market operating freely.
If you want to defend that labour market, it’s important to recognise who it benefits most – those who can afford to make choices that aren’t motivated by financial returns.
What the Conservatives have highlighted isn’t that there are poor returns for creative arts courses, but that these courses and, to an even greater extent, these industries tend to have a shameful record of opportunity for those from poorer backgrounds.
As a recent Sutton Trust report showed, students from disadvantaged backgrounds often don’t have the luxury of a three-year course that leads to a fulfilling and creative career that generates wealth for other people at their expense.
If we don’t protect our creative arts courses, we risk creative industries that become ever more exclusive and narrow. These industries are already extraordinary, but imagine how much stronger – or, to put it another way, how much more economically valuable – they would be by embracing all those with potential rather than just the privileged few who can afford to subsidise their vocation.
Any measure to cut public funding for creative arts courses would further entrench the lack of opportunity in the arts and would damage creative industries in terms of diversity and commercial success.
There’s also a gender disparity here. Women outnumber men by almost two-to-one in creative arts courses and so, when we talk of poor salary outcomes in the arts, what we may be describing to a large part is all the unfairness of the gender pay gap. Cutting creative arts courses would be a way to target women graduates more than poor courses that make an insufficient contribution to the economy.
What should happen instead
I suspect – and hope – that the Conservatives don’t want to undermine our creative industries by stopping the self-funded talent pipeline and cheap labour that supports their success.
Assuming so, the right response to low salaries in those sectors is to try to come up with less dunderheaded ways to measure aggregate value to the economy than graduate salaries.
They should also explore ways to ensure the massive profits generated in some creative industries – gaming, advertising, film, TV, and the rest – trickle down to those creating the value.
A well argued piece Johnny, as with many of the value arguments around HE we need to move from a purely financial model to reflect wider benefits to individuals and society. The fact that the very informative graduate reflections questions have been so poorly researched and used other than the rather poor Jisc compound indicator is a shame. What the data that is published here https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/graduates/chart-16 tell me is that in terms of activities fitting plans and using skills creative graduates do well.
Thanks, Richard
Your whole article assumes that those with Creative Degrees, end up working in the Creative sector, and this absolutely can’t be assumed. The reverse implication might well be true though i.e That most people who work in the Creative Sector have creative degrees. But this still doesn’t actually mean that it is genuinely essential to first spend three years studying for a Creative degree to be a useful employee in the sector and have a decent career; because who is to say that just starting as an 18 year old trainee and gaining 3 years actual experience in the workplace wouldn’t be far more effective ? It is just prejudice driving the sector making basic trainee entry level jobs only open to graduates.
Health Warning – You’ve missed the biggest problem with Graduate Statistics. There is absolutely no causation proof. i.e. An Arts graduate is much more likely to be employed in something that is either nothing to do with their degree, or perhaps only has a tenuous link. And even when there is a link, then there is absolutely no proof that doing a 3 year degree at an overall cost of £90k was essential to being able to do the job. It might well have been used as a selection tool by the employer, but how much of what they learnt on the course genuinely any use ? This is not at all proven – and thus all Graduate Statistics have fundamental limitations.
But of course we shouldn’t close all Creative courses. But we need to restrict the numbers to avoid the false dreams that are being sold by Universities that getting a creative degree is a surefire route to a fulfilling career in the Creative industry. Far too many school leavers are being enticed into HE and ending up with just a debt and no improved pay and in a job that is absolutely not the dream job that the HE sector promised them. What is happening is mass exploitation in order for the HE sector to sell courses, but society mistakenly ‘buys’ the myth that the HE sector is selling cast iron opportunity for all.
“It is just prejudice driving the sector making basic trainee entry level jobs only open to graduates.” When an employer sets a filter on who they willing to employ, it may be to limit their applications to those most qualified – over-qualified, even – for the job; it may be because they believe, perhaps on the basis of a weight of evidence, that that requirement is a genuine indicator of the individual’s ability to do the job; of it may be because they’re applying a useless prejudice against people who don’t have a qualification that they have capriciously chosen to regard as significant. I don’t believe it’s the third option, because it makes no logical or economic sense.
Most employers – and there is plenty of research from ISE and others to support this – aren’t that bothered what a graduate has studied. That’s not because they regard having a degree as a meaningless badge for filtering, but rather as an indicator of a genuine level of reliable employability. Is that indicator a guarantee? No. Is that level of employability unique to people with that indicator? No. But in a world where employers cannot afford to risk employing people who won’t perform, if course they want to stack the odds in their favour.
This is hugely valuable to the entire economy. HE not only acts as an indicator, but it genuinely raises employability. It could do it even better – a subject I’ve written much about. We could also achieve a better balance between the availability of different courses and the needs of the labour market. This mismatch is driven by our funding system which values student choice above all, rather than balancing it with employer needs.
Ultimately, the size of the HE sector should be determined by this balance. Because the evidence shows that better educated, more highly skilled economies thrive while those that suppress opportunity and limit skills suffer, I believe this balance would drive more higher education, not less. It would be especially favourable to sector like the creative arts which are economically valuable, but this is not adequately reflected in salaries.
It would be extremely interesting if HESA did what I am advocating they should do , and pivot their efforts to a in-depth sample survey of 28-30 year olds and see what actual career they are doing and properly examine whether an extra three years in education genuinely helped and made them better at the job. I think that if a survey like this was done properly (I am not convinced that staff at HESA would ever approach this sort of survey with an open mind, as they seem to me to have HE advocacy tendencies), then it would find that for only about 10% of graduates studying for a degree could be deemed essential; for a further 15% it would be debatable; and for 75% is simply couldn’t be justified , particularly given the £90k price tag. But whatever data is presented, I am absolutely convinced that die hard HE idealogues will continue to blindly advocate the wasteful and harmful Mass Higher Education model as if their life depends on it.
The employment practices described in the article for the Creative Art sector are not that different from those in the University sector…..
Absolutely. In fact, my argument could be used for any sector in which there are more graduates who want to work than available jobs. That drives down salaries and means when you compare them with less oversubscribed sectors, it looks like graduates are ‘undervalued’ in terms of their wages.
This is simply a matter of the labour market at work, but it shows that salaries are a fundamentally unsound way of assessing the value of any individual degree because the value may be hidden by the willingness of the worker to do the job for less than they could earn doing something they would want to do less.
Few people go into academia for the money and, if they do, let’s pray they’re not teaching anyone economics.
Well, it would suggest the degree has been devalued by the supply of graduates into the market- and that decreasing the supply by of graduates some arbitrary proportion probably wouldn’t meaningfully impact labour supply, because theres already an oversupply (if it did, it would presumably have the positive impact of improving working conditions).
The “value” of a particular skillset (in purely economic market terms) is related to demand and supply; I don’t think the suggestion for creative arts sector cuts is that theres no demand or need for supply to these industries, but that the supply substantially exceeds demand- which is, in fact, exactly what you outline!
Of course, this is all a bit by the by as the entire system has been designed with no means to limit supply to courses and nobody, including the Conservatives, has proposed how they would put one in; its essentially just gesture politics at this point.
Maybe part of the low pay issue,is the fact that many in the creative arts ,and arts /theatre are self employed, and on short term jobs, with large unpaid gaps in between. So it is not one size fits all.