Show Me the Value of my Degree, Please.

Last year, 2008, I graduated with a 2.1 in Media and Cultural Studies from a top 20 UK university. I was part of the last year of students to be paying tuition fees of £1,200, before the rise to just over £3000 for 2006 entry and onwards. Watching the
News this morning, I was surprised to be greeted by the fact that tuition fees are being suggested by universities, to rise to over £5000 in coming years.

Perhaps it is money well spent if you’re guaranteed a quality form of employment within the first 12 months after graduating? Yet having graduated over six months ago with a respectable degree, I still find myself on a continuing quest for employment.

I’m not alone either. Amongst many others, a friend who studied Marketing and Advertising and received a first degree, as well as gaining work experience from a well renowned advertising agency, is also still unemployed.

With the promise of a degree as a stepping stone to our chosen careers, we now only seem to only be employable to those ‘student job’ employers such as bars, supermarkets and call centres. As a result of the constant influx of rejection letters from graduate employers, for unpaid work experience as well as full time employment, I now find myself questioning, where is the value of our degrees?

Obviously, we are in the midst of a recession, but surely the government or our universities should be doing something to help graduates out in times like these, especially with the growing amount of student debt that each of us hold? Should it not be an incentive to universities for them to ensure that recent graduates set an example to their current and prospective students and find decent employment quickly, showing them why they should subject themselves to tremendous amounts of debt to complete a degree, justifying the increase in tuition fees?

So here I am, a fully qualified graduate, on New Deal Job Seekers Allowance, learning how to use a computer in a Job Centre Plus Training Centre. The government are paying for me to be unemployed and to train me for employment, whilst charging interest for the extent of my oh so ‘valuable’ education. Ironic, huh? Cheers.

Withheald Expression and Consumption

Having just sorted through my A Level art work I feel a guilt, a guilt which is telling me I should follow and apply my talent as an artist. Yet there is also a guilt holding me back, that is my mother. She doesn't want me to have a career in art as she sees it as a non-starter and constantly reminds me of teachers comments of the time that my production of work was'too slow'. Yet no one ever questioned why I was so slow at producing my work. The constant and mind-numbing lessons taken day after to day bored and uninspired me, I had no motivation to continue with something I had got bored with weeks before.

To insure my interest things have to move and change quickly.


There is also the constant reminder that graduate careers are always said to be 'hard to get into,you'll have to move to London and work for little money'.




I suppose if you really want something you haven't to bother about those kind of things, the only thing I know that I really want is to be happy. Not rich, just happy living a decent quality of life, without having to work all hours of the day in a job I really hate. I want to be employed in a job I'll always enjoy. A recent Guardian article defined this way of thinking as the 'Generation Y'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/may/25/workandcareers.worklifebalance

Yet a lot of people I know, whom are the same age as I, are driven towards money and materialism. One friend got a job in sixth form to buy herself a (very small) Gucci bag, then her dad bought her a BMW and she's only gone into the kind of degree she has for the pound signs, a recent comment about staying on at University an extra year was,

'why should I leave now and get a average graduate job for like £28 thousand when I can do an extra year and earn like £35-40 thousand when I leave instead'



Fair enough, but isn't this just snobbery? Most people would be happy with £28 thousand for a graduate salary- I know I would be, but I suppose different people hold different values towards money. It's always important to remember however that money can't make you happy, and neither can the consumption of the latest wannabe high status symbol-you're always going to be lacking, no matter how much you earn or how many expensive items you've bought with your monthly wage.