Is the Bachelor of Arts dying?
“I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Stage one: Introduction to the arts degree – principles and perspectives
“Imagine a world without English majors,” proposed a recent headline in the New York Times. Although such a prospect may seem utopian to some, there are good reasons to be concerned about declining interest in the study of traditional arts subjects in universities here and overseas.
While some subjects taught in arts faculties, such as criminology and sociology, are thriving, others are not. In general, the more a subject appears to offer the promise of employment, the more popular it will be.
Take English, perhaps the archetypal “arts subject” and a good example of the challenges facing parts of the faculty. The number of equivalent full-time students (EFTS) studying English at the University of Auckland has fallen from 548 in 2002, to 377 in pre-pandemic 2018, to 328 in 2020. Accompanying these changes are increasingly punishing workloads and pressure on standards. But the problem is much wider and goes back much further, according to Brian Roper, associate professor and former head of the politics programme at the University of Otago.
“The damage was really done in the 70s and 80s, where we see the expansion of commerce faculties at the expense of arts faculties,” Roper says. “Basically, arts go from being 50% of university students to 25%. And commerce goes from being 0% of universities to 25% … If you look at the period from 2005 to 2019, there was a decline in the overall number of tertiary education students of 124,500. This was when we had rising tuition fees. And the John Key government cut funding for student allowances by 27.8%.”
Universities are obsessed with international rankings and Roper has plenty to quote: “We’re in the top third of the OECD in terms of tertiary fees for domestic students. We’re towards the top of the OECD in terms of fees for international students. We have some of the lowest levels of student income support in the OECD. And the costs of all of this are being pushed onto students and their parents through the loan scheme.”
He notes one important exception to general underfunding of tertiary education: “The government increased funding per student for science, technology, engineering and mathematics [STEM] subjects, beginning in 2012, while simultaneously imposing a freeze on government funding per humanities student from 2011 to 2017.”
Dougal McNeill, senior lecturer in English and president of the Victoria branch of the Tertiary Education Union, says that “sent a very clear indication that arts subjects weren’t valued in the same sense”. But he has found a bright side: “In that context, I find the ongoing student interest and student numbers encouraging rather than depressing.”
It’s possible that the 200 or so students enrolled in each of the two literature papers available for stage-one English at Auckland this year are more committed than those in the past who took English because it was something they were good at while at school.