Are the arts students really starving?

Yesterday marked my first day as an Ink reporter. The paper is divided into beats, and I'll be covering campus news for the semester. My first story was inspired by a national CTV story that ran earlier in the week about graduates with arts degrees earning a lot less of a return on their educational investment than other faculties. As an arts student myself, I found this particularily intruiging.

I don't know when I started to accept the stigma about BAs, or how the stigma reached me in the first place, but I certainly wasn't surprised by the statistics CTV used. But, given my own personal interests I've always defended arts students, myself included. So, needless to say, I was excited about this story.

For a while I tried to find a member of the Arts Student Association, but that didn't pan out. Eventually, I just wondered outside the Jschool and asked a few people what they were taking. Almost right away I got the interview I used in the piece. Brianna Rotelick is a first-year here at the U of R, and she's taking general arts because she was waitlisted for education. For her, an arts degree will be a stepping stone to what she really wants to do: teach English. Not surprisingly, she's frustrated that he stepping stone costs $23,000. She gave me a great interview with quotes that worked really well with the rest of the story.

Next I spoke with Richard Kleer, the dean of the faculty of the arts. Right away he showed me conflicting statistics to those from the CTV article. They were even potentially from the same study. CTV never did tell me which study they used, despite a few phone calls. Kleer spoke of the value of arts degrees, and about how many students enrolled in his faculty aren't necissarily there to find jobs that will make them rich. They do it because they love it, he said.

My last interview was with Elissa Curr, who works at the University's Career Centre. She was another great interview. She told me about the challenges arts studetns can face, but she also offered constructive suggestions for those looking to boost their resumes before they graduate.

All in all, I'm happy with the story. Because it's a topic I'm quite interested in, it would have been nice to have more time to work on it and really dive into some of the statistics available. Even without those, I think it sends a clear message that perhaps the stigma of the arts degree needs to be retired.

Here's the story:

A university education is a big investment, and students expect big returns. But some statistics suggest that arts students are getting the short end of the stick. The University of Regina's dean of arts takes issue with the numbers.

A recent CTV story cited some studies with conflicting statistics, but the article  concluded that arts students made the lowest returns annually on their income, with percentages as low as four to six per cent.

“I worry that people read things like this and just accept it as gospel fact,” said Richard Kleer, dean of the faculty of the arts at the University of Regina.

Kleer doesn’t agree with the notion that arts graduates always earn the least on their educational investments. Referencing a 2007 federal Department of Finance report that shows educational returns from 1995 to 2002, Kleer pointed out that returns vary by discipline, not simply by faculty.

For example, in 2002, the rate of return for men with a BA in a social science discipline was 9.5 per cent, whereas a man with a science degree in agriculture or biology only had a return rate of 4.6 per cent. In the same year, women with humanities related degrees had a return of 9.3 per cent, again a much higher return than suggested by the CTV story.

 “I don’t know how the stereotype got established in the first place,” Kleer said, “But people now believe it and it’s very hard to break it, even if it’s not true.”

While not every student pursues an arts degree with the goal of working within their discipline, using an entire degree as a stepping stone can be frustrating.

“I want to be an English teacher,” first-year U of R student Brianna Rotelick said. However, the journey there could take Rotelick a little longer than the usual four years. After being wait-listed by the faculty of education, Rotelick decided to take an arts degree before getting her education credentials.

“I thought (an arts degree) would be a good place to go because it’s something I’m passionate about,” she said.

But Rotelick doesn’t love everything about getting an arts degree.

For one, Rotelick isn’t fond of having to use an entire degree as a stepping stone.

“It sucks,” she said. “I’m paying for my own schooling and the fact that I’m paying all this money for a degree that I’m probably not going to be able to do anything with makes it hard to go to class sometimes.”

 “When you come out of Arts, you don’t always know what to go in to, and it can be hard,” said Elissa Curr, the U of R Career Centre’s recruitment liaison coordinator. “The challenge (with arts students) I would say is that employers might find that Arts students are too generalized,” she said. However, Curr said this isn’t always the case.

Curr said that the best way for arts students to get a higher return on their education is to ensure they graduate with the skills they need for employment. One method to get these skills is by participating in the University of Regina’s co-op program, Curr suggested.

An arts graduate herself, Curr said liberal arts are a great field that can lead to great opportunities. “I found having that arts background definitely helped me find what I wanted to do and opened a lot of doors that might not have been opened previously,” she said.