Little more than ten years ago, “media” meant the future. People who studied it would be les grands savants of the 21st century. The industry conjured up images of fast technology, fast cars and fast money. Then the mid-decade recession hit and the world of media was brought crashing back down to reality.
In Spain, where, despite a high rate of university graduates, youth unemployment stands at nearly 40%, newspapers are awash with pictures of glum Spaniards, their Latin passion replaced by economic despair, perplexed as to why they can’t find a job. When one reads the adjoining captions however, the reason becomes immediately apparent. They are almost always arts graduates. After all, who ever heard of an unemployed doctor or biochemist?
In the West, many dismissed the importance of enrolling in science courses. Instead, we would take pretty pictures and write fashion blogs. The aspirations of immigrant mothers for their children to be doctors, long the butt of jokes, are founded on perfectly legitimate grounds. Degrees in the sciences lead to employment, the development of new ideas, improvements in living standards, and put food on the table.
That’s not to say degrees in the arts are any less challenging or worthwhile, but there are only so many art historians a society can realistically support. Many philosophers of the 20th century – Marx, Freud and Russel to name but a few – were scientifically educated. It was arguably their expertise in science that allowed them to develop new social theories and political viewpoints. Germany, one of the few Western powers to have seen its manufacturing sector expand since 2005, is renowned for its large number of science graduates. German culture still punches above its weight in the arts, having created some of the most prominent writers, artists and philosophers of the modern age.
With the introduction of the £1 million Queen Elizabeth prize for engineering, the government has recognised the need for more science graduates, and is clearly keen to avoid the errors of past governments who siphoned thousands of state school children into “soft subjects” in a bid to artificially inflate grades. The introduction of engineering scholarships available to children from disadvantaged backgrounds should also aid social mobility, given the top science courses are so often dominated by students from the independent sector.
In today’s world, where China and India’s highly competitive education systems churn out millions of highly qualified, but often artistically numb graduates, our ability to compete undoubtedly lies in being both scientists and artists, however hard that may be.
