You have to be serious when you’re a Masters student. It’s about knuckling down, focussing and not dyeing your hair a different colour every two weeks. So said my mother.
Despite the academic step-up from your bachelor’s degree, your feelings of superiority when faced with an unwashed and hungover population of undergraduates and a dissertation hand-in date in darkest September fade pretty quickly. You learn overnight that the really serious thing about being a Masters student is that the people holding the educational purse-strings have overlooked you. There isn’t any money.
We know this, and we know that every time George Osborne opens his mouth it’s going to be painful, but I do want to believe that if you work hard and aim high, you will be rewarded. Waking up to reality was uncomfortable, to say the least.
According to gov.uk, MA humanities students can be funded by the AHRC Arts and Humanities Research Council or ‘sometimes’ by charities and other trusts – ‘sometimes’ being the operative word. These grants and bursaries are gold dust and not a reality for most students pursuing a taught humanities MA. The Student Loans Company offers no support for postgraduate degrees unless a career in teaching is what you’re after. The only option is to get a bank loan and cry yourself to sleep at night thinking of the interest accumulating.
A taught Masters degree is an essential milestone on the road towards a PhD and a possible academic career. You can’t move forward without one, but it is an area of education that has been neglected when it comes to funding and support for students.
A good MA is tough, and rightly so. The rollercoaster of intense mind-expansion and long periods of solitary study can seriously knock your academic confidence. It is quite challenging enough without any added financial pressure.
Get a part-time job, you say! Fair point, and of course I would if I could guarantee that the hours spent frothing lattes in Starbucks wouldn’t jeopardise my degree, the very reason I took on the work in the first place. But perhaps my degree is in jeopardy already.
MA students are squeezed from all directions by very real financial pressures including rising tuition fees, rent, bills, food, books, travel and other course materials plus their heavy workloads. Many of those who start their MAs and experience financial pressures are becoming anxious, even depressed – and they are underperforming as a result. And let’s not forget the very able graduates who would have chosen an MA were it not for the cost. The fact is that people who can and should fly high aren’t gaining the academic altitude that they should. Part of Britain’s academic future has been clipped and the fact that it is due to money seems crude to me.
A highly-qualified workforce can benefit the economy and society generally, energising businesses and driving innovation. A meritocracy rewards the most gifted and hardworking, not a fraction of the most gifted and hardworking and those with the dumb luck to be from a wealthy background. I’d like to ‘knuckle down’, as my mother said I must, to some serious study without the constant worry that I can’t pay my heating bill or buy a key course text.
But it’s difficult. I worry for myself, of course, and my finances. I worry for my degree and more than that, I worry that future generations of students will face a pared down, dumbed down academia, that is only half up to the job and only available to those who can afford it. That, I believe, is serious.
Agree
Im tired of all this moaning you graduate students have. waah, I chose to do the humanities, waaa im unemployed.
Ridiculous. Want to be employed? Study a real degree like science. Everybody wants nuclear bombs and shit these days. Who gives a crap about Chaucer or Hume? (besides the hipsters that plague Costa Coffee in JB Morell EVERY SECOND of the day)
Otherwise, become a plumber. Theres a lump of gold in every mound of shit.
Yusu Bastard- You completely misunderstood the article, she’s not ‘moaning’ about being unemployed at all… she’s worried about the lack of funding for postgrads, a valid concern.
Why should humanities postgrads be funded at all? Tell me what tangible benefits it actually has to offer, other than hipsters in the library who believe reading Edmund Burke or Ezra Pound is worth taxpayer money?
Despite YUSU Bastard obviously living up to her/his name I am inclined to agree to an extent. There is a lot more funding available to subjects such as economics/science, degrees which (and I’m afraid to say this) are degrees which will actually benefit the economy to a greater extent.
However, I will not take Bastard’s philistine stance that no funding should be available for humanities degrees. What a sad world it would be if everyone simply studied 3 subjects to the detriment of the arts, which although some may argue are ‘non-essential’ (not my view), provide much needed diversity and enjoyment (and are important in other economic and non-economic ways.
The trouble is funding is based proportionally on the perceived economic importance of subjects which, again I’m afraid is necessary due to finite resources. This means there is an implicit subject ranking with those at the bottom receiving little to no funding.
It is however, my view that education funding on the whole needs to be increased for the long-term benefit of the country’s economy if we are to keep up with competitors. Funding at Masters level is now almost non-existent for all subjects which means that it becomes a qualification only available to the few with the resources to self-fund.
The problem with non-arts students weighing in on the arts, is that they demand everything be ‘tangible’ and real world. The value of everything shouldn’t necessarily be determined by how many jobs it creates, or how it benefits the material world.
This is an argument that has been had over and over by far better informed or articulate people than you or I, YUSU Bastard, but if I were to sum it up, if we were to strip everything from the world that had been created by studies the arts, and to remove all knowledge that had been contributed from arts graduates/post graduates, imagine how dry and dull life would become. Cultural capital is important, as much as you might like to deny it.
This country is renowned for its contribution to the arts, and its investment in the arts throughout history. I’d hate if we lost our legacy of Shakespeare, and Dickens, and Austen, to a world that considered 50 Shades to be the greatest literature because it sold the most.
Who cares if life is ‘dull and dry’ ? Arts are only really enjoyed by the ruling elite classes, who think life is built for them.
I for one, hope we become something akin to the DPRK. They seem to be doing well.
As an external opinion,
anon, do you not believe that with a public debt of over £1trn, whereby we spent around 3% of GDP a year merely ‘servicing the debt'(I presume interest), it is reasonable that we can only afford to heavily subsidise humanities for three years.
The arts are very important, I’m not in dispute of this, however do you not think when faced with issues such as cutbacks of departments such as healthcare that funding towards the fourth year should be cut back?
Arts have been crucial to making our society more civilised, but doesn’t warrant chopping off our public healthcare system.
In an ideal world, YES, but we don’t live in an ideal world.
A science student whose heard of Erza Pound? Oh the wonders…
@anon: Where would Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen be without their MAs in literary criticism?