Stuff and Nonsense

Or How Much Do You Need to Know

Graduates pop out of the University sausage factory, clutching their certificates, and weeping with the exhaustion of juggling a 20 hour job to pay for courses that cost as much as a family starter-home, while slogging to get a First, without which you cannot be short-listed for any decent job. But employers (what a demanding bunch they are!) still insist that graduates these days know very little Stuff.
That is nonsense. Graduates have never known enough Stuff.
It seems the problem is getting worse, because in the internet age, employers have realised how much Stuff is out there, a whole Googleful of Stuff, several internet universes and galaxies of it.
Stuff is what is all around you and happening all the time. You can never know all of it because it is constantly changing, there is new Stuff every day.
Employers want graduates to apply their specialist knowledge to new Stuff. In some quarters (the high tech industries) this is known as 'innovation'. But in most service-oriented companies such as banks, it means that young recruits must hold their own at a cocktail party and make intelligent pronouncements on topical and ethical issues. Topical is important: the best Stuff is what is in the newspapers, it’s what everyone is talking about. You need to have an opinion on President Obama’s health reforms in America even if you have always used the NHS, because you need to understand that Obama’s reforms can affect the direction of US politics. You must know about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and how they are impacting on Life As We Know It, you must be conversant on the Great Climate Change Debate (if you don’t know what happened at Copenhagen, bone up on it now) so that you can knowledgeably discuss economic losses from global warming (if you are an economist) or legal implications of (if you’re studying law).
All that is Stuff.
In the old days, before Facebook, and before newspapers and TV were dominated by vacuous celebrities, you got most Stuff from the news media. Early lessons in developing instant opinions on Stuff came from hearing Dad shout at the TV.
But that was then and this is now.
You no longer pick up Stuff. You have to go in search of it. Usually via Google, which does not necessarily provide the best overview of Stuff you need, much of it being out of date. Stuff has become pretty random, and therefore elusive and even more sought after than before.
The need to know Stuff has become so important, it is being taught.
New courses are springing up on campuses, like weeds between the cracks of education, and some of them are at quite prestigious institutions, too.
The London School of Economics has just started its own Bluffers guide to Stuff opaquely called “LSE 100”. (100 what? 100 facts? 100 lessons? 100 per cent?). It is compulsory for all students a bit like “study skills” tends to be, but packaged as “skills graduates need in the modern world”, a marketing slogan that could apply to anything in education.
LSE 100 will involve “group work, debates and exercises” so that students form opinions about events around them and are able to articulate them. In other words, they will talk to each other. In that sense, it is completely different from other undergraduate interactions like snooker, table football and karaoke.
Why does the LSE need to do this? One reason is that it has set the grade barrier so high for entry, particularly in Economics, that it is getting too many number-crunching nerds and not enough communicators who can tell you why on earth they are crunching all these numbers. Students need learn to debate, predict and to “think”. Now there’s a thing - a world-class institution where students aren’t particularly good at “thinking”.
The LSE has a particular problem because its courses are mostly delivered in huge lectures with next to no interaction between lecturer and students. Its “teaching”, unlike its research, has consistently been given low marks by students. In other words the only value added that LSE seems to provide, is its brand stamp on the CV of its students, not on their knowledge or thinking. That did not matter in boom times when graduates went straight from the LSE into the top banks and consultancies. It does now when employers are picking and choosing.
Imperial College has for some time had “communication skills” as a course for its students. Many science degrees at other universities include some non-science – philosophy or history of science is popular. They must not only prepare for careers in theoretical physics these days, they must also apply their scientific learning to Stuff and be able to tell non-scientists about it in an interesting way.
Less specialised institutions are so concerned that their students are lacking in Stuffing that they are redesigning courses, some are even talking about introducing liberal arts degrees, which can be anything you want them to be, and are generally a foundation course in Stuff. Other institutions are introducing general courses in the first (or even second) years of study. General courses cover a fair bit of Stuff, which, after all, used to be called General Knowledge.
Employers are a canny bunch, they are adept at spotting where there is a shortage. So, for example, they shout about British and American graduates not having foreign languages, and demand fluency in at least two before they will hire, even if recruits never, ever use those languages again. Because employers see fewer and fewer interviewees who can hold their own on Stuff, they want candidates to have a lot of it, whether or not they need it.
I have a theory, when books have disappeared, and have been completely replaced by Stuff, most of it only digitally available, employers will be looking for recruits who are proficient in Literature and only books of 500 pages and above will count.
Institutions like the LSE that do not now do so, will add literature and philosophy courses. They will have to, or their students will be well and truly stuffed when they come out into the real world of never having enough.

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.

Why your birth-date might make your fortune

Women have been rushing to have selective caesareans and induced labours this week. Why? So that their baby can be blessed with the luck of being born on 9/9/9.
Those born 9 am or 9 pm might even have a double dose of good fortune. An even luckier date was 9/9/1999, when there was a virtual frenzy on labour wards, especially where there are large Chinese communities for whom 9 is a particularly significant number.
Leave aside the day and month for a moment, does it really matter which year you were born in? The answer could be yes. Researchers have indeed found that people born in particular years have greater chances of success and riches than those born in other years.
This is not because the numbers 9 or 7 or whatever have any magical powers. American sociologist C.Wright Mills found that the largest number of super-rich Americans such as John D. Rochefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P Morgan etc were all born within a few years of each other in the 1830s. They are the richest men in history even by today’s standards. And unlike most wealthy people today, did not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds. “The best time during the history of the United States for the poor boy ambitious for high business success to have been born was around the year 1835”, he says.
This was due in part due to the railroad and industrial boom in America. Another fantastic year to have been born was 1955, birth year of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla (founders of Sun Microsystems). It wasn’t the configuration of the stars in the heavens but the coming together of technological advances just at the right time for these men to understand the great opportunities ahead. That does not mean all 1955ers became millionaires, but they had a better chance than many.
In the West, unlucky birth years were at the very end of the 19th Century. Your youth was spent in the trenches of World War I, your working life in the 1930s depression and your 40s and 50s fighting in World War II. Conversely the best birth year was 1930, too young for the depression and War, during the high growth decades of the 1950s and 60s. The writer Malcolm Gladwell makes a lot of this in his excellent book “Outliers, The Story of Success” on why some people achieve more than others, although he makes it clear birth year is not the only factor.
But back to the here and now. Studies have been done in Canada on how recession affected the career paths of those graduating in 1980 and 81 (1959 birthdays), the negative effects lasting a decade or more.
Perhaps we are right to be worried about the 1988 birth year graduating into a recession. There may even be a case for politicians to even out birth year advantages and disadvantages with some kind of affirmative action - just a tongue- in-cheek thought that might prevent women rushing to the labour ward the next time the numbers stack up.