A recent media report rehearsed the bleak narrative of declining enrolments in humanities disciplines in New Zealand.
Fortunately, not all universities are experiencing a decline in the demand for humanities subjects, as enrolments at Massey University attest. It is worth pointing out that numbers of domestic students are also falling in other tertiary subject areas, including management and commerce, agriculture, environmental and related studies, and engineering and related technologies, albeit without attracting the same measure of media scrutiny.
But the comments made by the academics interviewed recently make it clear that falling enrolments and course cancellations are not just a crisis for the humanities: amongst other things, they are also creating a potential crisis for employers.
At first sight that assertion may not make a great deal of sense, so let me clarify it. The former Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister, Sir Peter Gluckman, has pointed out that “the speed, scope and pervasiveness of digital technological change… sets the digital revolution apart from past technological revolutions in the way they challenge aspects of human behaviour and social institutions”.
Work is one of those “aspects of human behaviour”. We cannot yet foresee exactly where we are heading, but there is no longer any doubt that the digital (or fourth industrial) revolution is already substantially reshaping the nature, location and duration of the work we do. Crucially, too, it is also changing what employers are looking for in prospective employees. Bluntly, as the technical facets of work become increasingly automated, employers are intensifying their emphasis on the importance of transferable (or soft) skills.
The evidence for this is incontrovertible and comes from both home and away. On the home front, in a Radio New Zealand interview in 2016, Kim Campbell, the chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association, put it this way: “Soft skills are really important. Do you get along well with other people? Are you comfortable with other cultures? Are you able to learn new skills? Are you willing to change as things change? Are you flexible in your attitudes to things? These things are hard to measure, but boy are they important in building a career.”
Elsewhere, in a March 2017 article in the New Zealand Herald, Mark Averill, CEO and senior partner with PwC New Zealand pointed out that: “These days it’s all about people who can solve problems and are able to change and adapt quickly, so it’s increasingly important for graduates to have softer skills… personal and social skills, so we can assess whether they have the ability to build relationships with clients and others.“
For compelling international evidence, it is hard to go past the results of Google’s Project Oxygen, which identified the qualities of its top employees through an analysis of all of the hiring, firing and promotions data the company has gathered since 1998. At one of the spiritual and economic homes of the digital revolution STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) expertise scraped in in at eighth place. The first seven places in Google’s league table were taken by transferable skills, leading a Washington Post article from December 2017 to observe that “those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer”.
My point is not to dismiss the importance of STEM expertise. It is not to suggest that what is good for Google is good for the rest of us. And it is not to argue that graduates with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) have a monopoly on transferable skills: those traits are certainly the defining feature of a BA but they should characterise any well-designed and taught tertiary programme. My point is to pose questions. Why are we countenancing declining enrolments and course cancellations in the areas that produce the sorts of graduates Kim Campbell, Mark Averill, Google and others have identified as important to business success? Why are we tolerating tertiary sector policy settings that are producing fewer of the very people we need more of? Why are we not talking of the crisis in the humanities as a looming crisis for employers?
This crisis belongs to all of us. We live in a time of transition and we need to stop talking about enrolment patterns in our universities as if their long term effects are limited to the job prospects of academics. The crisis in the humanities badly needs to be reframed as an issue of national importance. We talk a great deal about the importance of physical infrastructure (and rightly so); it is high time we had an equivalent conversation about the mix of the nation’s stock of intellectual infrastructure.
Professor Richard Shaw is the Director (Arts) for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University.
Find out more about how you can future proof your career with a BA www.massey.ac.nz/ba
