A world in which every graduate is a lawyer or economist

“We used to be divided up into the left brained and right brained, now there’s only lawyers and economists.” I heard this wry quip at the University of London Union the other day, and at first I thought it was a new wrinkle on the old “arts versus sciences” divide.
It wasn’t. It was a reflection of how student subject choices are converging around a far smaller number of subjects than before, despite a huge range of new degree offerings in all sorts of subjects, including Golfing, Surfing and Acupuncture.
In the past the verbally inclined studied History and English and a range of other “essay type” subjects. Those who might once have studied the humanities are turning in increasing numbers to studying Law. The more mathematical who might have done Science or Maths, are enrolling in Economics and Business Studies courses in droves, causing severe shortages in the Sciences and Engineering.
Medicine has always been popular, but the biologists and sociologists of old are turning increasingly to Psychology. Psychology is the generic social science.
Law, Economics, Psychology have been among the decade’s fastest growing degree subjects. Talk to ambitious sixth formers and, including Medicine, you’d think there was nothing else.
Whole areas of academic study are contracting. Languages graduates and sociologists are among the endangered species. And any kind of pure science is met with blank stares of pure incomprehension. You want to do what?
Of course the bunching up of subject choices is as much a result of rising student debt and salary expectations as it is due to fashion. It is the economics of studying economics, that counts not the subject itself. It is the logic (in career terms) of studying Law that drives the choice.
Universities have colluded in this, cashing in deftly on rising demand. Law can be delivered at relatively low cost, you just pack more students into the same lecture theatre. Law departments can be expanded more easily than say Dentistry, Veterinary Science and Architecture, which require considerable investment in space and training equipment.
The US has long believed it has too many lawyers. There is a widely held belief that great deal of litigation occurs simply to keep them in business. Yet law schools continue to churn out more and more of them. And why do we need so many Economists? One wit suggested to me that it was draw up projections of how many lawyers a company needs.
In some fields, students cotton on early that a fad is passing. In the 1990s, particularly in the run up to the dot.com boom, many were rushing to study Computing and Computer Science. Nowadays these graduates are the most likely to be still seeking a job six months after graduation. Many countries trained too many nuclear physicists in the 1970s and 80s as planned nuclear power stations failed to come on stream thanks to strong environmentalist lobbies. A nuclear scientist is a rare beast these days. Other gluts such as Medics in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s and Economists in the Netherlands in the 1990s were exported to shortage countries elsewhere in the European Union, so that the oversupply was not so apparent.
Law tends to be more country-specific so it is easier to spot an oversupply of lawyers.
Even the Law Society in England seems to think we have too many law graduates. It has been warning for some time that there aren’t enough training places for the vast numbers coming out of university law courses. In other words, the chances of actually becoming a lawyer are becoming slimmer.
In an unprecedented move this summer the Law Society started a campaign to warn university and secondary school students against choosing law as a career and is examining other ways to keep student numbers down.
Of course those will law degrees don’t necessarily want to be lawyers. Many politicians, thinktank wonks, businessmen, civil servants and even film-makers have law degrees, the training that they get at university is very transferable. But all the evidence points to students actually wanting to become lawyers. In 2007 shortly after the demise of Lehmann Brothers, which precipitated the recession, I spoke to the careers department of the London School Economics. Suddenly those who had been considering Banking as a career were now considering Law. How else would they pay off the cost of their degree?
I for one, think it is remarkably honest and brave of the Law Society to tell it how it is. Usually there is a conspiracy of silence around a glut. Some years ago Media Studies was all the rage despite the general derision in which such degrees were held by practicing journalists.
Universities piled on Media courses and they were lapped up. Some universities even invested in state of the art newsrooms and TV studios, nowadays forlorn and empty as a rust-belt car plant save for the occasional student editing some footage for a YouTube spot.
For a while it did not matter as so many tech-savvy media studies graduates were hoovered up by the expanding online-world. Every company had to have its webpage. That web page had to be constantly renewed, then redesigned and upgraded. That Media Studies graduates had been hoping to be TV news babes rather than webmonkeys was put aside. From the point of view from the universities, their graduates had jobs and could begin paying off their student loans.
But now the contraction in the traditional media industry has become so severe and, the skills mismatch has become heartbreakingly evident.
The problem is that unlike even a decade ago, degree subjects are not selected on the basis of individual talents or interests, but on trends and income (on graduation).
Everyone is looking out for the next big thing and if they find it, they are damned as hell going to go for it - all of them at once. It is a brave student who is maverick enough to study Latin or Linguistics without a thought for what they will do afterwards. If I were an employer I would hire them for simply daring to be different, and for not caring about the economics of graduate subject choice.
Still, there is a trend that intrigues me, a glimmer on the horizon: the growth and growth of philosophy and theology degrees. Those must be the ones philosophic about their future, or else praying that eventually something will turn up.