Fine art degree: employment prospects

[EpsomSalted]

My child is predicted A in Art, A in history and A in Spanish at A-level. She is leaning towards doing a Fine Art degree but her other option is History with Spanish. Her heart is with the art option.

How employable is someone with a Fine Art degree nowadays? What can you do other than be an artist, an art teacher, an art therapist or a designer? I know nothing of the creative industries.

Also, do you wed to do an Art Foundation before the degree? Her school says she does but uni requirements seem mixed.

and finally where is good for fine art that’s NOT in London?

all advice very gratefully received.

He was on at 10 week paid internship this summer. His grad job is £32k pa. Its with a major UK company, in their marketing dept.
He applied through the usual route. Did all the AI screening, AI interview, full day selection board. There was no luck involved.
He has no prior connections.
He has work experience and volunteer experience in related and unrelated fields. Which he drew on in the app.
He hasnt yet passed his degree.
Fine art. From a 'modern uni'
He writes long essays, uses critical thinking on his course, researches and cites, and has prof practice modules. Plus much else.
When he chose his path we too looked at statistics. And my DH was dead against it. But I said to DS, statistics are just statistics. You can make this work and he has.
The diff between history and art isnt amazing, both are under the £25k starting sal mentioned. The grad market is vv tough. A great many grads in many subjects will not get grad jobs. Doing a degree you are passionate about and you will maximise your opportunities at is better than 3 years of doing something half heartedly.

Oh and his degree choice never came up at any point in the app process, except positively..
Anyway ill step away now. I have said enough!

My history graduate son has been trying to get a graduate trainee job for a year!
DH and I both went to art school ( a well regarded one) so obviously know lots of art school graduates. Three paths: retrain in something practical, teach, freelance life, sometimes all three. Don’t know anyone who even tried to secure a traditional graduate trainee type corporate job do know many people who have had interesting and successful careers, some well paid, some more public sector type salaries. Can’t think of anyone who regrets their choice ( well SIL kind of does but she did a post grad in IT and has a well paid corporate job so it worked out for her). I do know friends who regretted being pressured into “ sensible” courses by parents ( I think parents in those days were often unaware of the fact that you didn’t have to do an accountancy degree or a law degree to then become an accountant or lawyer for example).
it was easier for us to live cheaply and still have a bit of fun in the early nineties, we didn’t need to move home, cheap flats were available even in London and the benefits system was more user friendly ( there was a scheme to help you set up in self employment that helped a lot of creatives get started). It would be harder now.
DH created his own career and earns a good income ( where does it all go!) I have never earned a lot and had three children so have mostly been subsidised by DH but have always found something to do that suits my skills and interests. I’m doing garden design and maintenance atm, love it!
There is not a clear career path for Fine Art graduates but that’s kind of the point, hard work, flexibility and imagination are needed.
DS3 is at art school, I really don’t worry about his prospects, I trust him to find a way.

Would she consider Art History and Spanish? I don’t know where that might be an option but it would be one way of keeping her interest in Art alive.

More fine art grads don’t get graduate jobs than nearly any other degree. One swallow does not a summer make. It’s very foolish to think this success story can be translated to every other fine art grad. One exceptional student isn’t a majority!

What fine art course requires long essays? Oxford do. I see university isn’t mentioned!

DD is 18 and we are seriously considering whether she just works as an artist or does a fine art degree first. She has a commissions list and could potentially get more work, but becoming self-employed at that age is a lot to consider. I think if she does a fine art degree it might broaden her practice and give her context (and time to grow up too). Art is her passion and I'm in no doubt it's what she needs to be doing at the moment. She intends to be an artist, so a fine art degree seems relevant. I'm not sure she'd do it to go into teaching. A genuine alternative for her is to go to a specialist arts school (not offering a degree) and she is tempted by this. But, I think she will be able to pursue a lot more within the university context, as she has many other interests. Both routes seem quite expensive if they're not exactly necessary for your career though.
Incidentally, ds went to a uni ranked almost the best in the world and is likely to want to work in a sector completely unrelated to his degree (and less well paid than his degree subject). Sigh.

In my experience people who graduate from a fine art degree leave without having gained any of the skills most of them went in for. The harsh reality of most art schools in the UK is that they don’t teach you any core “art skills”. Instead they saddle you with a large debt you have no way of paying off once you leave because realistically they haven’t actually given you any of the skills to make you employable.

If your son is expecting knowledgeable teachers who can teach him figurative drawing or painting, how to mix oils, the principles of classical sculpture, how to draw accurately from life - 100% forget about finding that training in the UK. His best bet would be to go to a place like the Florence Academy of Arts, which teach a very high standard of traditional art skills (but is very expensive). Every fine arts graduate in the UK I’ve met has complained of feeling like they have never been taught how to make art, and have just been told to bullshit about their conceptual artwork for three years.

Artists earn some of the lowest wages in the country, and have some of the fewest transferable skills. If he wants to gain actual art skills in the UK then he’d be better off getting work training as an apprentice in a fine art foundry, for instance, which will teach him art skills, mould making, and give him a practical insight into the real art world. He could supplement this with some business courses or one to one coaching to provide him with the business skills to launch his own art career in time. I believe places like the Craft Council offer this.

It would also be worth him looking into the bursaries and grants available for craft skills too. The craft/art divide is pretty arbitrary (lots of what is called craft is actually art), but there’s lots more funding for craft skills training and he’d have a better chance of getting work at the other end (plus he wouldn’t have a huge debt either). Goldsmiths company provides funding for young people wanting to get into the trade, as does the Kings Foundation I think.

It depends on what she wants to do afterwards. As a general degree it’s as valuable as any other.

I’m in a “Big 4” firm in consulting. Out of my most recent tranche of grads the ones I remember had art history, archeology, engineering, history, physics. All completely unrelated to the type of consulting we do.

I agree with @Imbrocator about expectations of teaching. Skills aren’t really taught on a fine art degree in the uk, it seems. Although the technicians often have lots of know-how they’re happy to pass on and some degrees include compulsory sessions in all mediums, so a block of carpentry etc. dd would also enjoy Florence Academy of Art but it is expensive and more so when you consider you’re not eligible for student loans the way you would be for a UK degree.

@SimoneHereArt History is not Fine Art. Completely different.

I know someone who did art, They eventually, after 2 years of job hunting, got a job designing corporate images - strategy, brochures, logos etc and hates it. He is currently changing direction and studying law.

Yes.

However I didn’t have a fine art grad this year, I had an art history grad. They were examples of variety.

I have also had a fine art grad in the past, and his transferable skills were just as good as all of the many and varied other degrees.

@Imbrocator No student loan must be paid off. You could see it as a fun degree paid for by the tax payer to which many art students make very little contribution at all because their earnings are so low. In effect the state pays for these degrees and parents cough up as required. Paying off the loan? - the IFS research says they don’t. However it’s not a requirement that they do.

Does anyone know what percentage of all graduates end up in "graduate" jobs? Who decides what makes it a graduate job anyway?

I'm sitting in my art gallery as I write this, on a Saturday, and we have had a few sales today already, so that's good :)

Full disclosure I work in the week as an accountant..

Outcomes information is now posted on UCAS against every degree where enough graduates respond to the Graduate Outcomes Survey (15 months after graduating), and there are aggregated stats online here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/graduates

This is self-reported data. There is no other way to track it. The results reported against my son's engineering degree are presented as % in "work and study", and % in "most common jobs" related to this degree. But I think the wider data looks at salary too, which may be considered a proxy for "graduate job" (but possibly not now that minimum wage is £25k per year for this age group)

Interesting website. I love that we collect all this information. Personally, when I graduated with an accountancy degree in the 90s, I found that the accountancy firms wanted people with humanities degrees that they could 'mould', so what I thought was a relevant degree counted against me

... this is what it says on my son's engineering course (first pic) versus Fine Art at the same uni (second pic). On both it says:

"The number of student respondents and response rates can be important in interpreting the data – it is important to note your experience may be different from theirs. This data will be based on the subject area rather than the specific course. Read more about this data on the Discover Uni website."

"Most common" jobs for fine art (from the Prospects report) ...

Thanks all. Just came back to this and also looked at the helpful other thread people linked to.

I am wondering if I can get her to scratch the art itch with a gap year foundation course at an atelier in Europe which would be great for her art and fun and intense. Then she could do a history related degree for three years and then decide between lots of options that would be available to her.

@EpsomSalted there are definitely opportunities in Florence. The Prospects report rather bears out what the majority are saying. Where are the better paid jobs? Gone to others it would seem.

They all require long essays. And a dissertation.

This is what makes it a degree🙄

Making art and teaching art is a good life. And people who do those things are artists not 'artists'. If that's the life the OP's daughter wants, then she should do an art degree.

Good thoughts there, thank you.

I think the point still stands that it’s not a good choice of career because of the debt - you are either forced to live with debt and play the game of keeping your earnings under a certain level, or have the weight of paying it off if you do manage to make a success of it. Better to not acquire the debt in the first place!

@Imbrocator Do you know what the rates are for paying it every month? So someone earning £35,000 a year pays £900 pa “graduate tax”. That’s the same whether they “owe” £30,000 or £60,000. It’s a sum based purely on earnings. The bigger issue is, this is over 40 years now. However no or low earrings below £25,000, no payments. I have never heard of anyone keeping earnings artificially low. Most people need the money.

Just to weigh in a little here; on the "skills" point, DD has recently graduated from an Illustration course that actually taught drawing plus lots of other artistic techniques. She was very happy with the artistic-skills content of her course, and has emerged able to work in a huge range of media (including ceramics, her new love).

Her own desired career path is "to do something involving making art and earn enough to live" rather than anything more 'aspirational' (although personally I think that sounds like rather a lovely life). She's currently selling a few very small pieces freelance, and trying to find pretty much any job. Her current thinking is that she'd rather like to be a school Art Technician; as an opposing viewpoint to the PP who compared that unfavourably to teaching, she would rather not have all the stress involved, which she has seen close-up as I am a teacher!

She certainly doesn't feel that spending three years learning art skills in a beautiful city with friends equally passionate about her subject was a waste of any kind. Let's see whether that opinion changes in a few years!