E very year, newspaper articles appear with headlines like “BEWARE: These Mickey Mouse degrees could RUIN your career prospects AND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE”. Every year, I quietly seethe. For one, by the time a piece like that is published, around A-level results day , the vast majority of students have already picked their university course.
What possible good can come from telling an entire fresh-faced cohort, armed with nothing but their hopes, dreams, and a carload of Ikea flatpack furniture, that they hitched their ride to a dud? But the other more personal reason for stories like this making my blood boil is that, nigh-on 20 years ago, I chose one of the biggest “Mickey Mouse” subjects to ever grace a university prospectus: drama. According to analysis from the jobs website Adzuna looking at the salaries of graduates, my chosen degree ranks dead last, dubbed the “worst value” of the lot. Drama grads, languishing at the very bottom of the heap, earn an average of £23,126 five years after donning a cap and gown.
It perhaps wouldn’t sting quite so much were it not for the fact that all other arts and humanities-type subjects leave it in the dust, including marketing (£26,495), English lit (£26,711), fine arts (£28,575) and music (£29,162). (Marketing was a particularly bitter pill to swallow.) Now, I can sit here proclaiming that “money isn’t everything” – and it really isn’t – as much as I like, but we all know it won’t wash.
I’m speaking from .