Bristol University Humanities and Languages entering managed decline

[Ceramiq]

https://epigram.org.uk/university-of-bristol-voluntary-severance-humanities-langauges/

This is so sad. I’m not surprised though. Young people have been force fed this idea that only way to succeed is through STEM.
Languages, Arts and Humanities have been marginalised in secondary schools for a long time now, so here we are.

This but also the very real issue that Humanities and Languages degrees just cannot attract international students with their higher fee income while also requiring (especially for languages) a lot of teaching time.

My eldest did a modern languages degree with linguistics, then took a gap year to live amd work in Spain whilst doing her tesol and then went back for a pgce. She teaches at a.secondary school was commenting how interest in languages is waning and how there are many degree courses closing. It really is a shame. Her head of year actively campaigns in the area about the importance of learning new languages.

Learning Modern Foreign Languages to a reasonable standard is very difficult without long periods of complete immersion in high quality settings, something that Erasmus helped with.

Agreed about Erasmus . Mine did half a year I. Spain and the other half in Italy . Two years later there was no Erasmus .

very real issue that Humanities and Languages degrees just cannot attract international students with their higher fee income

The very real issue is that the UK - a combination of citizens and successive governments - does not want to pay for an internationally excellent HE sector. Parents & students themselves don't want to pay what it costs for their education, and they're too complacent about universities always being there and being excellent.

Hear hear @ParmaVioletTea.

And add to that the UK government’s obsession with killing the goose that lays the golden egg by trying to make the UK increasingly unwelcoming and difficult for international students.

The cost of the university sector has spiralled out of control because of the ill conceived expansion and loans strategy. It is now quite clear that the UK cannot afford for as many home students as currently go to university to do so. One of the ways to address spiralling costs in the short term is to increase the number of international students such that they subsidize the education of home students. In arts and humanities it is not possible to recruit enough international students to meaningfully subsidize departmental operations, hence the requirements to cut those departments.

Very sad. There will soon be nowhere to study languages!

Yes, I agree. The removal of Erasmus funding and properly managed exchange programmes has made languages, already unpopular, financially out of reach for all but the richest families who also know that languages are learned more effectively in other contexts than UK universities.

To some extent, MFL degrees have always been the poor man's access to language learning. Plurilingual students are a dime a dozen in London universities such as Imperial or LSE where they are studying STEM and social science degrees. Graduate recruitment schemes value languages only as an addition to a degree in a more professionally-oriented subject and expect total professional fluency which is not what most UK MFL degrees support anyway.

The removal of a language from compulsory GCSEs in 2004 was the start of this and Brexit and Erasmus was the final blow. No pipeline of GCSE-A-Level-Degree-PGCE so no home grown teachers, then no overseas teachers. It's a travesty but was pretty predictable as soon as that decision was made in 2004. And for what? To make it look like education was improving by removing one of the harder subjects.

I did languages and linguistics and DH did languages. It is so sad to see the decline. All my DC did/are doing a language at GCSE and one did A level but for my youngest there is only one language available at school so not even any choice if you don't fancy the one on offer.

Languages open the world so much, you understand the culture in a different way one you start to get to grips with language. I've been able to live and work in different countries. It's wonderful. I don't actually do anything to do with languages now, I retrained and did another degree but I bet much value the humanities and languages background.

STEM is where the jobs are I guess, and even then it's hard enough to get one. What do you do with a History degree? AI I'd imagine is getting rid of jobs requiring languages at a rate of knots. It's wonderful to have the opportunity to study these things and they are important but when you're coming out with 50 grand in debt you have to really think carefully about what is going to get you a job at the end of your 3 years.

The uni's overstretching themselves has put them in this position, with their loans to build, build, build now that the government are making it harder for International students to come who were relied on to fill and pay for the buildings. These same students were in some cases ruining the uni experience for the home students because they were allowed in no matter how poor their English and had to pass no matter how poor their work because the uni's needed them and couldn't afford to become known as somewhere that foreign students didn't do well.

UK students already pay some of the highest fees in the world so to say they are not prepared to pay what it takes to provide a decent education is just ridiculous. Universities need to take some responsibility for this huge mess and stop trying to make out that it's everyone else's fault.

Absolutely this. Though I actively discouraged DDs from studying languages at A level. They both got 9s in their GCSE German (and I paid for a tutor so that they had a decent chance of being reasonably confident speakers at that level) but the number of people taking A level German is tiny. Some of those would have had German from birth or lived in a German speaking country so DCs chances of getting high grades were reduced. And every grade counts for university entrance.

Machine translation has been on the rise for decades and predates AI by a long shot. AI is bad at capturing nuance and detail. Languages and cultural mastery (and see the rise of Instagram influencers analyzing cultural differences - this is a huge thing) are difficult skills to acquire and comparative and inter cultural skills are needed more than ever. The problem in the UK is the poor standards of GCSE, A-level and undergraduate language teaching.

History degrees teach deep analysis skills from multiple sources.

I’m really sad to read this, as a Bristol MFL graduate myself. I get that STEM subjects are very much where it’s at currently, but thinking in more than economic terms I do worry about what society will lose longer term from many fewer people studying Humanities and Arts subjects.

My own degree at Bristol was pretty multidisciplinary, providing a grounding in history, literature, politics and philosophy alongside the languages themselves, and coming from a very ordinary, suburban, monolingual background (I was the first in my family to attend university) it hugely broadened my horizons and gave me a deep appreciation of both my own language and other languages and cultures. I was lucky enough to benefit from Erasmus, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my year abroad in particular was instrumental in shaping me as a person. Such a shame to think that fewer and fewer young people will now benefit from similar opportunities.

The cost of the university sector has spiralled out of control because of the ill conceived expansion and loans strategy.

This is not what I've observed, working at a relatively senior level in UK HE for the last 3 decades ...

UK students already pay some of the highest fees in the world

They really do not!

I’d be interested to understand why most unis are struggling so badly financially from someone who really knows the sector @ParmaVioletTea if you can shed some light, I’d be grateful

Well at least Erasmus funding is back, so that’s great news. The 26/27 intake should have it in place for their Year Abroad, although the details are not clear yet.

I’m also sad to hear about parents actively discouraging their DC from taking languages. It adds so much to your overall skills and opportunities.

• The tuition fee hasn't kept pace with the actual costs of educating home undergrads

• Research funding has become harder & harder to get; research funding has historically defrayed a lot of academic staff costs, known as 'overheads' - the costs of providing office, lab, and library space for research

• Successive governments have steered applicants away from arts, humanities & some social sciences, even though AI (mentioned above) is going to decimate computer science, for example, That is, STEMM is not exempt

• Successive governments have fiddled about with conditions for international students (whose fees heavily subsidise UK students) including them in migration figures (which is ridiculous - they're not migrants) and now stopping them from bringing families with them (how to bar women from a LOT of countries from studying here in one feel swoop)

• UK families not valuing UK HE and what it brings economically & culturally to the country. We have one of the bEST HE system in.the.world. But universities & what we actually do are treated with derision or ignorance.

The current government could do a few simple & low or non-cost things to help - starting with taking international students out of migration figures, and talking about the way Arts & Humanities graduates (including those with multiple languages) with really well-honed critical & analytical skills will counter the apparent depredations of AI.

AI is stupid - it is not creative and it is not critical. It simply strips large language corpora of data. BUt humans have to instruct AI and analyse the results.

For example, AI could tell you how many times a particular word is used on MN, but it takes a human brain to make meaning from those data, and to think through significance and implications of those data.

ETA: so overall, it's a mix of cultural &ideological factors, and economic & financial matters. The two interact, and so we get the mess we're in now.

I doubt people will be so sanguine when universities start going bust - take Lancaster (fab university in a gorgeous town) - if that university disappears, so does one of the major employers in the area.

Thanks for such a comprehensive answer, this makes a lot of sense and seems really short sighted and such a shame.

Oh for God's sake. What do you do with a History degree?! I'm in publishing, friends are in finance, law etc

Thanks @ParmaVioletTeafor such an insightful response. I agree with everything you say about AI and think the sidelining of the Arts and Humanities, with all of the transferable skills they foster, is incredibly shortsighted (and in the long term detrimental to our society). I’m also slightly baffled as to what all of these (in some cases presumably rather reluctant) STEM graduates are actually going to do.