I am so frustrated by the conversation around the government’s attempt to use the COVID economic crisis to engineer the subjects chosen at degree level.

Students get two significant pieces of advice:
1. Pick your degree subject carefully: it will critically influence what you do afterwards and specifically how much you earn.
2. Pick whatever you love, most employers don’t care what subject you studied & any degree opens doors.

Neither of these positions is untrue, but they are essentially contradictiory. And students get these from parents, teachers, careers professionals, the media, government, their peers, university-experienced and non-experienced people alike.

Which position and authority they trust, and which they decide to align themselves with, is incredibly personal.

But the environment in which students are making this decision is one which will enshrine privilege and which is is hostile to less privileged students and which turn their decision against them either way.

Whichever strategy is adopted by large numbers of lower-income students, it is by definition the wrong one.

When significant numbers of students from lower-income backgrounds choose vocationally and commercially-oriented degrees often at newer universities, high-status employers look for traditional academic subjects because that’s where they’ll find students w/ higher social capital.

There isn’t nearly as strong a relationship between the price the market assigns to your labour and the subject of your degree take as there is between the price the market assigns and the pre-existing social capital of people on your course.

(IMHO, the best options if you are a working-class student who wants a guaranteed return on your degree, pick Nursing/Allied health professions, teaching or built environment, especially quantity surveying. This is not based on any quantitive evidence, just observations!)

Nursing/AHPs, teaching and built environment all:

1. Lead to solidly paid, always-necessary professions
2. Are expensive to teach, so the number taught tends to stay relatively stable and closely related to workforce needs

and most importantly

3. Don’t lead to sufficiently prestigious, influential or well-paid jobs that they attract significant numbers of middle-class students.