Humanities degree never more useful

A degree in the humanities has never been more useful than in today's world of unprecedented technological change, director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Research School of Social Sciences, Professor Iain McCalman said.

"Pundits warn us that our future patterns of work in this post-industrial age have never been more unpredictable or volatile," he said. "In the near future, we are told, people may work primarily from home on computers rather than in a corporate workplace; they may have to job share, to do several jobs at once, or retrain several times as the rapidity of social change renders earlier skills obsolete."

But Prof McCalman said this alarming picture was not one that should depress arts or law graduates because they had acquired degrees that would enable them to adapt and survive.

He said it was a only an inability to adapt to unpredictable changes that could make dinosaurs of people in the future, not a failure to train people to become specialised vocational workers.

"Never, in fact, has a broad generalist degree such as the Bachelor of Arts or Laws been more relevant or socially useful. Paradoxically, it is because the degree does not necessarily lock you into one fixed and highly specialised occupation or skill, that makes it such a valuable resource."

Prof McCalman said humanities students may not know, when they graduated, exactly what they would be doing the next year, but they could be reasonably certain that when they opened the employment section of a newspaper, there would be a variety of positions for which they could apply.

"Some years ago I found myself on an international flight sitting next to the chairman of one the largest chain of multi-national companies in the world," Prof McCalman said. "To my surprise I discovered that he held a philosophy degree and had never done any business study at university. He was not, he assured me, exceptional: his company always chose its potential executives from people with broad-based liberal arts degrees.

"He said the company disliked vocational degrees because they did not, and could not, teach the particular variety and combination of skills needed for a rapidly evolving business. When selecting executives of the future, they looked for people who were imaginative, articulate and, above all, intellectually flexible."

Prof McCalman said the businessman believed a general arts degree was most likely to produce those qualities and predicted that this pattern of recruiting would become more widely adopted in both business and government.

"I tested his thesis out the following year on a batch of a dozen History Honours students. I asked them to keep in touch with me for several years after they graduated so that I could get an idea of how they had fared."

"The results were fascinating: not one was working where they had imagined, yet without exception all were flourishing," Prof McCalman said.

He said those students were survivors in the struggle for employment because of their capacity to adapt to changing work environments.

"The dodos of the future will be those whose skills are too narrow and specialised for such adaptation," he concluded.