I take my inspiration for this post from an article by Belén de Marcos for 20 Minutos, of 31st December: “La crisis ‘postcarrera,’ una realidad que sufren muchos jóvenes” (“The ‘post-degree’ crisis, a reality many young persons suffer”). The article has a curious subtitle, a quote from one of the persons interviewed: “Te hacen creer que te comerás el mundo y el mundo te come a ti” (“They make you believe you will eat the world and the world eats you”). It does, certainly. What I fail to understand is who are the ‘they’ this person alludes to, whether parents, secondary school teachers or university teachers; I am beginning to believe that ‘they’ must be the advertising campaign managers selling the degrees to keep struggling universities alive by attracting a stream of daydreaming and/or ambitious students.
De Marcos does not refer to any specific event as a trigger for her article, which is rather a report on the basis of a few conversations with recent graduates. Their comments are typical in the current circumstances: they feel lost before a job market they don’t know at all, most think of prolonging their studies with a master’s degree (which only delays the post-degree crisis), and all call for more practical subjects that prepare them for the reality of employment. It is obvious that many students start their BA degrees with a superficial perception of higher education and scant awareness of how their studies might connect with the job market. This is absolutely normal, since 18 is hardly an age at which a person is ready to choose a profession for life. Much more so current 18-year-olds, who are resisting the idea that work is a central part of life because they are mostly being offered trashy jobs by the predatory post-2008 crisis capitalism of our days.
The 92 comments to de Marcos’s article by manifestly older readers are bitter, resentful and disparaging. Most regard the young persons interviewed as examples of impractical softness before a situation older generations have faced with more flexibility and expediency. In fact, one of the experts consulted by the journalist expresses the same opinion and mentions as a major problem la “sobreprotección parental en la Universidad de forma parecida a como antes se manifestaba en el instituto” (“parental overprotection in the University in a similar way to how it was present in secondary school”). As far as I know, we don’t have parents assaulting teachers to defend their children from the negative effects of their poor performance, a type of aggression many of our secondary-school colleagues have suffered. However, it is evident that helicopter parenting and the generous but misguided overprotection of teens and young adults are not helping the younger generation to learn resilience and self-confidence. What baffles me is that our graduate students must be already in many cases the children of parents with university degrees, and should be able to compare different generational experiences, a point which is not raised in the article nor in the comments.
I am struggling to find original arguments for today’s post because it seems that all the angles have been considered. I’ll assume then a cynical position and argue that the university and the job market can never be reconciled, nor should they. In 2019 Katie Hannigan (@katiehannigan) posted a clever tweet that soon became viral: “My friend got a degree in Egyptology, but can’t get a job, So he’s paying more money to get a PhD so he can work teaching other people Egyptology. In his case college is literally a pyramid scheme.” Many replied that unfortunately there are very few jobs for Egyptologists with a PhD, but the point is valid. Although the tweet refers to a rather niche speciality, the whole university is a pyramid scheme of sorts: the institution uses students, both graduate and post-graduate, to justify its existence and produce what really interests us, which is research (I won’t comment for now on the fact not all teachers are researchers). Since the university is staffed by persons whose main target was always tenure (or is still tenure and how to obtain it), we have no idea at all about the job market beyond our campuses. Except, of course, for the part-time associates, whose mission is supposed to be connecting professional expertise to teaching but who are mostly persons interested in tenure combining several jobs just to be eligible for their miserably paid jobs (what we call in Spanish ‘falsos asociados’).
From this perspective, the university is far less generous than primary and secondary school, for which teaching students is the main aim, with no second aims connected with research. In contrast, we all know that many university teachers barely put up with teaching as an annoyance in the path of what really interests them, which is research. I myself still love teaching but I am certainly much happier now that my teaching workload has decreased noticeably (thanks to the validation of my publications by the Ministry through the research assessment exercises or ‘sexenios’) and I have much more time for writing. I would be awfully frustrated if my teaching totally prevented me from doing research.
This connects, obviously, with the students’ disorientation regarding employment: an institution concerned with its own research goals is hardly the place to transmit any know-how to navigate the job market. We don’t have that know-how. I assume there are persons in my university devoted to helping alumni to find jobs but we don’t have at a Department or Facultat-level job counsellors. I don’t even know if that is a position offered by universities to their graduate students, either post-BA or MA. We do have a 6 ECTS ‘Practice’ subject since this is compulsory for all BAs following the implementation of the Bologna-style degrees in 2009, but this is very different from offering systematic counselling. We used to have a teacher, Michael Kennedy, who would gather yearly a number of alumni and undergraduates and organize an informal counselling workshop based on the alumni’s experiences, yet that was done out of a personal initiative, and not following formal directives. It was, besides, too much to expect a part-time teacher to assume the responsibility for that type of meeting, when its organization should be in the hands of the head of Department.
Given that experience in my Department and the students’ demands for better orientation, I believe we need a formal structure to appoint careers counsellors. My university has a mentorship programme within the alumni association, but this is carried out on a volunteer basis and one-to-one contacts, which is not what is required. When I was BA degree Coordinator, I naively assumed that the Department could maintain a list of alumni and make the meetings that Prof. Kennedy used to organize a far more systematic activity that could be extended to the whole university. This never happened because the university’s practice of contacting students only through their UAB address means that, once they leave, contact is lost (unless one keeps lists of personal addresses, which is simply not done). I did contact UAB’s alumni organization for help, but they seems to be interested in a far wider approach to this matter, without specific counselling for specific degrees. To be specific, then, if a student asks any of us in my Department what they can do once they take their degrees, the most we can do is point out the list of suggestions in the websites publicising those degrees, but nothing more practical. I don’t know, for instance, how one becomes a secondary school teacher, which is the occupation which mostly interests our students, though I do know which steps a student needs to take to become a university teacher.
I hinted before that the university need not concern itself with the job market and, of course, I exaggerate, but although I do believe we could do much better if we had a network of career counsellors as part of our degree system, I reject the idea that all subjects need to have a pragmatic approach applicable to employment. Our research is often speculative, as it should be, and as such it cannot be conditioned by what a fast-changing job market demands. We are constantly starting new degrees to meet new demands but I believe that the job market itself should integrate postgraduate professional training. I find it absurd that places of employment expect new graduates to be trained to suit their needs, as these are enormously varied. There will always be an immense tension between what the job market demands that we do at the university, and what we are willing to do if we must protect the speculative, non-applied side of generating knowledge. I give this opinion as a Literature teacher well aware that her teaching offers students scant training for any job (though I defend the idea naturally that the reading and writing skills are always useful) but I am also thinking of colleagues who teach theoretical physics, or similar subjects, and are constantly under pressure to translate their speculations into employable skills beyond their Departments.
In the article I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a graduate student commented that the university should be seen as a means rather than an end, and I believe this makes perfect sense. The times when one studied a degree and obtained a well-paid employment for life thanks to it correspond to the elite university of the past, which in Spain changed dramatically when so many new working-class students accessed higher education in the 1980s. We used to have five-year Licenciaturas which were replaced with four-year Licenciaturas and then with four-year BAs and it is now generally assumed that students need to take a fifth year, with an MA, thus completing the same kind of extended education we used to have. I am not, however, a big fan of MAs, which have been introduced in Spain as rather general courses open to a variety of BA graduates rather than as the far more specialized courses they should be.
In any case, having a BA or an MA is just a starting point in a professional career, thinking besides that life may take you in peculiar, unexpected directions for which there is no formal education or professional training (think of e-sport professional players, if you wish). I like very much for that reason the Spanish idiom ‘buscarse la vida’, which translates as fending for yourself but is far more colourful in the original, in which you ‘seek your own life’. We need to do much more from the university to help students to seek their own paths in life, but we need to be more realistic, too, and avoid peddling false expectations in our advertising. Competition for students is tough and will grow tougher as the cohorts diminish because of falling birthrates. We cannot, however, lie to students and promise that our degrees will secure well-paid jobs for them, because this is unrealistic and dishonest. As they eventually find out, sooner or later.