BRIAN MOONEY QUESTIONS & ANSWERS My daughter has applied for a series of Arts degrees through the CAO. With the constant encouragement from government and industry to apply for courses in Science, Technology and Engineering, are students who choose to study arts selling themselves short? What is the benefit of studying an arts degree?
Your daughter need have no fears about the value of taking an Arts degree. Humanities/Liberal Arts degree programmes form the bedrock of the student population of most of our universities, with more than 25% studying these programmes. Mary Hanafin encouraged prospective students to study Arts when she said: "Our graduates of the humanities and social sciences are eminent among the bright, creative, flexible and innovative talent for which Ireland has become renowned."
The arts degree is a vast programme, covering a multiplicity of choices, with most universities offering up to 30 distinct subjects. Some, such as English, are extremely popular, and students are inevitably surprised at how different it is to studying the subject at second level.
The challenge at university is "independent learning". A student's success depends on how much he or she is prepared to put in to exploring their chosen subjects, through reading, discussion, and critical thinking.
Within an Arts/Humanities degree, your daughter will have considerable variety of choice. If she selects an omnibus programme, she can "taste" subjects before making her final selection. The number of subjects available can vary between three and four in first year, dropping to two or sometimes one subject, for the remainder of the degree.
Alternatively, if she opts for a denominated degree, she will have selected her subjects before entering university.
• It may come as a shock to many Arts graduates to find that prospective employers are often not particularly interested in the specific subjects that they have studied. For many employers, a knowledge of Geography or Italian is less important than the independent-learning and self-motivation demonstrated by an Arts graduate. Also relevant is that in achieving these competencies, students involved themselves in numerous college societies, learning the skills of public debating, as well as actively participating in the sporting life of the college. In other words, they have proved through achieving their degree, and participating actively in college life, that they have a wide range of transferable skills.
Recent figures show that within one year of graduation, over 50 per cent of arts graduates began postgraduate study, while 40 per cent were in employment, and fewer than 4% were still seeking employment. The range of careers open to Aarts graduates is enormous: teaching, politics, civil service, journalism, performing and visual arts, PR, financial services, recruitment, management consultancy, customer service, entertainment, sales, marketing, social work, e-commerce, tourism . . . the list is endless.
Arts and social science graduates have the flexibility to move in any direction they may wish. Many of them take post- graduate masters in specific career areas, such as journalism or business. The key strength of an arts degree is its flexibility.
