Sense and vocational sensibility

AS THE British higher education system begins to delaminate because of its financing problems, hard-nosed employers are having doubts about some vocationally linked degree courses. At least so we are told by the Council for Industry and Higher Education in Trends in Higher Education, published last week. Forget the quantity, feel the quality seems the new order of the day.

The spotlight is on such subjects as media and design studies, which scarcely existed as first-degree subjects a decade ago and were marketed like hot cakes in the Great Rush to Expand. Critics say these courses are disproportionately concentrated in the new universities. They are latching on to evidence that their entrants have lower than average academic qualifications and their graduates higher than average unemployment. The dog is fast being given a bad name.

The issue has been wildly exaggerated. Media and design studies, for example, lead any league table for the percentage increase in admissions over the past ten years for the obvious reason that today there are over 1,500 places overall in these subjects whereas ten years ago there were under 100.

In number terms, however, "academic" subjects such as psychology and sociology have grown far more. What is more, the percentage rate for graduate employment (as opposed to unemployment) for those coming off the "new" vocational courses is at or above average for the system as a whole.

Your chances of being in paid work six months after graduating seem to be better if you have studied something in creative arts and design than if your chosen subject was biology, a physical science, maths or one of the humanities. The reason why, say, design study graduates also feature high in the post-six-months unemployment table is solely that a much lower-than-average percentage of them stay off the dole by going on to further study.

But let us stop being defensive and come clean about "vocational" higher education. It should not be a primary purpose of a higher education system to provide employers with specific industrial training for free. The primary purpose should be to educate.

I am not referring here to vocational postgraduate study. This part of our business has to be focused very clearly on helping people get specific jobs, or on improving their career prospects if they already have a job. Here the ideas of employers as to the content of the curriculum and the way in which it is delivered need to be solicited and heeded.

In tight professional disciplines, such as medicine and law, this can work well. In a less structured trade like journalism, the successful expansion of postgraduate education has been supply- rather than demand-led. Media employers do not usually know what they want until you have offered it to them and tend to confine their constructive criticism to calls for more remedial English.

We faced these questions when, after 15 years of experience with postgraduate journalism courses, we decided to design the first undergraduate journalism programme in any British university. Our starting point was that whatever journalism may be it is not an academic subject. Our next perception was that whatever media studies may be it is not a vocational training. On these foundations stones we then tried to construct a programme that contained enough rigorous academic work to constitute an academic education and enough vocational skills training to give those students who wanted to earn their living as journalists a chance.

For local reasons we chose economics, sociology, psychology and philosophy as the academic meat in the journalism sandwich. It could have been any other academic subject. It could even have been media studies, which when well taught can provide an interesting liberal education.

A properly constructed undergraduate course with a substantial vocational content is every bit as good a preparation for the uncertainties of post-industrial life as anything. Where possible, of course, the vocational elements should include a high proportion of transferable skills. In our case we should like as many as possible of our graduates to spend the first part at least of their working life as working journalists. But, equally, we should like to think that even those who do not will be more effective at what they are doing by virtue of the fact that they had acquired skills of journalistic expression and presentation.

The same kinds of consideration should apply to all good vocationally based education programmes. There is no reason why such courses should be judged narrowly by whether their graduates then find permanent employment. No one says history courses are a failure because such a tiny proportion of history graduates earns its living as historians?

Hugh Stephenson is professor of journalism at City University.