the Unflattering Truths About an Arts Degree
Remember that good old quote by Mark Twain?
"It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.”
This quote hits hard, especially for freshmen who feel a bit cheated by the promises of university life. Recently I read a piece in Overthinking with Angelene that described her experience with deferring from her arts degree. The piece was so honest and courageous that I had to leave a comment, only to find out that we went to the same University and had both become disillusioned with university life at different points in our lives.
A week after reading the post, a young woman approached me at the State Library and expressed that I’ve inspired her to study English Literature. Initially, I felt quite pleased with myself. I’m inspiring a younger generation to study what they love. But upon reflection, compounded with the fact that Angelene’s experience is probably the rule rather than the exception, I ran home and started drafting this article to offer a few words of warning for people who wish to pursue an arts-related degree at University.
Myth #1: You Can Get an Easy Pass if you Love What you Study in Arts Degrees!
It blows my mind how many people fall prey to this insidious University Logic, and this is how most people end up head-first in an arts degree without knowing what they’re doing.
Here’s the brief formulation of this flawed logic:
I don’t know what I’m doing -> A degree is better than none -> What’s the most flexible and easy degree that can occupy my time? -> Voila! Arts Degree.
After a few weeks, they end up studying something they don’t care about, reading material they’d summarise with Chat-GPT all in the name of an easy grade. Here’s the thing. In my experience, Arts degrees, though flexible, are not easy at all.
For the sake of argument, however, let’s say that you do care deeply about what you’re pursuing (Philosophy, Literature, you name it). But even this initial passion will one day collide with the hard reality of all the bureaucratic nonsense. Do you have an exciting idea? You better write in a stern academic voice and cite everything as meticulously as a neurotic head chef who counts Rosemary by leaves. Do you want to read something you’re interested in? No, you better bury your head in the yawn-worthy pile your professor assigned from Jstor. Oh! Do you want to spend some time enjoying a novel assigned in a class? No, you only have a week to read the book, analyse the hell out of it and churn out a paper.
This is insane. It’s a miracle that people ever manage to emerge from these red tapes alive let alone still keeping a shred of their passion for their subjects. Whenever someone says to me: “I’m going to study x in university because I love it.” I can already sense that they’re on the path toward facing a total crisis a few weeks into their studies.
I faced a similar crisis when I started my arts degree back in 2020. A few weeks of classes destroyed all the romantic dreams I had about studying Theatre and Literature, and it became very clear what it would take for me to get good at my subjects: eat shit and get the boring stuff right.
It was absolutely painful to learn citation conventions and principles of academic research, and I averaged 65% in all of my subjects. But then, during the second semester of my sophomore year, things started to pick up. I learned how to budget time to write a paper and finish assigned readings while still maintaining a reasonable social life. I learned how to translate good ideas into more conventional academic writing and was rewarded for it. My grades started to pick up, and I became more passionate about my subjects as a result.
Long story short, the initial shock from bureaucratic BS is what deters a lot of freshmen who wandered into the course looking for an easy win. In reality, the first year or so will be painful but that’s the price for getting to a deeper level of academic understanding (note: I italicised academic because though rigorous, it is still quite a limited scope to look at learning). So rather than holding onto a romantic dream, the quicker we acknowledge that there will be parts of our degree that will drain our soul, the better.
If you think it’s too much trouble for what it’s worth, I would even say keeping the arts as hobbies is much better than learning to resent it in three years. But if you do yearn for that rigorous and academic understanding, just keep in mind that it’ll be tedious before it gets better.
Myth #2: Arts degrees are cheaper than other degrees
Again, the reality is a big slap in the face. I’m only going to write about this in the Australian context (because this is where I did most of my schooling), and this giant shitstorm started in 2021.
In June 2020, Education Minister Dan Tehan announced one of the biggest shifts in domestic student contributions that hiked up the cost of Arts degrees by 113% in 2021. His reasoning? We need more people studying nursing, engineering, maths and teaching since the goal of education is to raise “job-ready graduates”.
I have many objections to this line of reasoning, but that’s a separate post in itself. For now, let’s put this 113% into perspective. A typical degree in the humanities (adjusted for inflation) would normally cost around $23,773 over three years. But after the fee hike, it skyrocketed to $50,693. Fast forward to today in 2024, the annual cost for studying the humanities experienced a sharp rise by a margin of $9,639 according to data released by the Department of Education.
I started University in March 2020 which placed me among the last cohort to start an arts degree before the fee hike. And under the HECS-HELP student loan scheme, paying off the loan before my 30th birthday isn’t that much of a stretch. But for the cohort of 2024, the projected student debt plus uncertain employment prospects sound like an absolute nightmare.
The Americans are probably laughing at these figures since an average degree in the U.S. would cost more than twice the amount we’re paying. Nevertheless, the point still stands. Arts degrees are not cheap. So, unless you’re European, going into academia, or an aristocrat, have a sober conversation with yourself because an arts degree is levelling its costs with its counterparts in STEM and Law.
Myth #3: Arts degrees teach you things you can’t learn yourself
Speaking of an expensive degree, is an arts degree worth all that money?
Scott Galloway in his recent TED talk articulated that luxury brands get away with ridiculous prices because they can create artificial scarcity. The same concept applies to arts degrees. Since the direct effects of graduates on the economy aren’t immediately traceable, the liberal arts had to adopt an elitist rhetoric just to survive. This is reflected in the language of academic writing, the grading schemata, the overpriced reference materials and exclusive journal access privileges.
From my point of view as a recent graduate, though I enjoyed the formality of university, I still struggle to find that exclusive thing they tried to keep behind the closed doors of academia. You can learn all the ways of reading/literary interpretation via free books online and the essays you write only train you to sound more like an academic. So essentially, you’re going to university to learn a system of language and practices to excel in a strictly academic setting, and the skills are not as transferable as they initially seem.
In fact, the higher up you go in the academy, the narrower your focus becomes. What started as first-year survey courses (English literature from Shakespeare to Austen) becomes more and more specialised in the second/third year. In my last honours semester, we only studied two books: Don Juan by Lord Byron and Ulysses by James Joyce over 6-months. Is there value in this kind of total immersion? Absolutely. But are those skills relevant and transferable outside of academia? I doubt it.
The challenge, as I see it, lies in bridging the gap between the academy and the general reading public. It’s rare to find a trained scholar in the humanities who’s also an expert communicator, and we’re left with experts from other fields thinking that they can use the humanities as mere mouthpieces. This is why, though I can see the limitations of the academy, I am still committed to pursuing a doctorate in literature alongside all of my work on the internet. This intersection deserves more focus, and I can envision a future where everyone can enjoy the fruits of the humanities from credible online resources.
Myth #4: You’ll make a ton of friends and have the time of your life
This point isn’t limited to arts degrees, but there is a floating stereotype that while STEM students are hard at work, those studying an arts degree are busy drinking and chatting about existentialism over rolled cigarettes.
Again, the reality is not at all the case. In the Australian context, though there has been a rise in enrolments in the humanities (a 14% surge at my university compared to 2019), the funding from the faculty seemed to have lagged in facilitating campus-based events. When I was a first-year undergrad, my campus experience proved to be rather isolating. I’ll take a paragraph out of Angelene’s post to illustrate the experience:
What I encountered instead was a series of disappointments. Lazy lecturers turned what should have been enlightening lectures into uninspired sessions filled with memes. My classmates, glued to their phones, refused to engage in meaningful conversation. The learning environment was overly digitalised and isolating, stripping away the communal essence I had longed for. Tutors, far from encouraging, often reminded us that we’d likely end up poor and miserable, casting a shadow over our academic efforts.
This is a result of the adjunct-teaching system. According to a 2020 report from the NTEU, out of the 11,300 staff members of the University of Melbourne, only 112 have been converted to permanent staff, resulting in insecure income/career prospects for post-docs and tutors. As a result, regardless of noble visions of providing quality teaching, the reality of the system left tutors with excess workload which inevitably led to burnout. The impact of this on the student body is self-evident: disengaged tutors can only deliver the bare minimum and nothing else. As a result, the promised dream of engaged in-class discussions is replaced by memes on PowerPoint slides and students glued to their phones.
Linking this back to the lack of networking opportunities, in my experience, making friends proves to be an uphill battle in these stale teaching environments. Also, given a lack of funding, student-led clubs in the arts have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to organise campus-based events. My girlfriend, who was a former president of a design club, supplied me with an abundance of horror stories of unmotivated committee members, disengaged teachers and a severe lack of funding. “Sometimes we had to fight to get just $2000 a year”, she said, “it’s an impossible budget. Most of the time we couldn’t afford to hire venues.”
Therefore, in reality, arts students are not the beneficiaries of an abundance of networking opportunities. I’ve done most of my networking at university pubs and my Monday reading groups, and making an active effort is always the first step to establishing any connection.
In short, the dream of making a ton of friends is not real. If anything, the networking aspect of university is an uphill battle, especially for students in arts because the administration won’t help you. So don’t be afraid to resort to the basics: ask someone for coffee after class, inquire about a cool event on a poster and hang out at the pub after a whole day of studying.
Myth #5: You’ll become well-educated after your degree
One of the main reasons why we choose the arts/humanities is to become well-rounded citizens. Again, the experience of the degree is quite far from the noble vision.
I had a conversation with a classmate who was about to finish her last year of undergrad in English literature. For the sake of anonymity, we’ll call her N. N told me over lunch that she felt rather stagnant with where she’s at with her understanding of her discipline.
“Maybe I’ve read a few more books than my mom,” she said, “but besides that I still don’t feel I’ve learned anything.”
- Anonymous Third-Year Student in Literature
There’s an argument to be made that the job of education is to teach you enough so you know what you don’t know. Still, in my experience, given the way assessments and degrees are structured, there are ways to read the least number of books while getting the highest grades in a standard arts course.
Reading lists have shrunk from entire books to excerpts and it’s possible to do well with a barebone understanding of the basics. And by the time third-year rolls around the workload will get so heavy that understanding has to take a back seat and make space for the assignment crunch. As a result, a lot of students graduate with the feeling that their degree didn’t deepen their knowledge of their disciplines.
The reality is that the degree will give you what you put into it. Chase down citations and expand your understanding with extra readings. Have a chat with a professor to see what books they would recommend and most of them will be more than happy to give you advice. In short, get a taste for self-directed learning because if you leave it up to the university, you’ll only get a quarter of your money’s worth with a degree.
Bottom line: follow your passion but proceed with caution
Again, I can only write about what I know. Circumstances might be different in your country and I feel obligated to warn people before they start this path. There will be a lot of obstacles and challenges but at the end of the day, there is still a lot of value in what an arts degree offers.
For example, the network I’ve developed put me in touch with some of the leading literary critics and philosophers (yes, I did bump into Peter Singer at a festival once). My training in literature opened doors to industries like publishing, cultural management and the emerging field of the digital humanities. And though there are things that could be improved, the work is more intellectually stimulating than anything I’ve come across.
In a sense, I came to university looking for a degree but I left with a genuine love for academic research and networking. This line of work isn’t for everyone. The hours are ridiculous and the workload is more than what it’s worth, but for those of us who love it enough, we’ll still find a reason to power through though all the odds seem to be stacked against us.
So, in conclusion, I say follow your passion but proceed with caution. You’ll not get everything the university has promised, and how much you get out of your degree is mostly up to you. But if and when you get lucky, you might just leave your degree with something unexpected.
