The discourse of higher education as an investment is seen in the UCAS advice (2016c) that encourages applicants to write about their future plans, and how they ‘want to use the knowledge and experience that [they] gain’ at university to help them achieve these plans. Crucially, it expects applicants to have reflected on these plans, and be able to articulate how university will help in realising them. Many of the applicants accept this, writing about how a university degree will help them in their career progression, though as I will demonstrate this is largely reduced to merely having a degree, with little
reflection on how the experience of studying their subject will aid them in the
future.
Looking at the statements, the applicants did not write about their future plans in much detail. This might be due to their lack of understanding around how attending university will really help with their futures, beyond simply having a degree. Rupert (CSRG) and Sam (CSP92) exemplified this, writing in their statements:
My career plan is to become either a web developer or to work in robotics and artificial intelligence. I consider myself to have all the skills necessary for my life abroad as well as to fit in at your university. By doing all the projects stated above I've gathered skills like patience, leadership and the ability to organize and sort information efficiently. (Rupert)
It has been a lifelong ambition of mine to work in the IT Industry and would like to advance my knowledge through the course being offered at your academic institution. I believe that with hard-work and
determination alongside my innovative personality I feel that I would be an ideal student for a University degree based around ICT. (Sam) In these cases, the applicants dedicate just one sentence to their future plans, and place these sentences within larger sections about what would make them
ideal students, which must be linked to an idea of what they will do once they
graduate, even if they only have a vague idea. A non-ideal student may have
no idea at all, and may be seen as frivolous, taking on the endeavour and debt of a university education for no economically rational reason.
It could be argued that the link between degree and career is more easily drawn for a subject like computer science, but there was a similar approach in the history applicants’ statements, who also wrote from the assumption that simply attending university would help them with their future careers. Katherine (HRG), for example, displayed a level of naivety about her future profession. Her ‘future plan’ is to become a well-known historian, and while she was aware that studying history at university would help her with this, she made no mention of wishing to go onto postgraduate study, which would be necessary for the type of work she is describing:
I want to be an academic historian and author to inspire others; further developing our understanding of our past […] I want a job where I can explore the subject I enjoy and nurture the future generation of
historians. Reading history at university will help me achieve these things.
It may be fair to question just how much of a fully developed future plan 16- to 17-year-olds could be expected to have, especially as there is a finality to this expectation that is arguably at odds with the idea of an ever improving, entrepreneurial subject. It implies that following university there will be no
need to change, adapt, or retrain, which is what this subject should be willing to do. It also denies any precariousness in employment, or that future plans may not come to fruition for reasons beyond an applicants’ control. This may be one example of cruel optimism at work in the application process in asking
applicants to set out a desired future. This is particularly cruel in the case of a
student like Richard (HP92), who wrote in his statement:
I truly hope to be able to attend university, and I aspire towards a career in law as a barrister or a solicitor. I look forward to the
challenges of university life and the continuation of my academic work. I truly hope that I am able to join your university and to have a bright future and career.
As a young working class man with a disability, an alumnus of a low-achieving State academy and now a first-generation student of a Post-1992 university, Richard will face many structural barriers if he does try to become a barrister or solicitor. The legal profession remains dominated by the graduates of independent schools and Russell Group universities (Ashley et al, 2015; de Vries, 2014; Milburn, 2012; Savage, 2015), so it is hard to see objectively how a student like Richard would be able to enter into it, at least without a great
deal of support and a fair bit of luck. Richard was seemingly unaware of these
structural barriers, and though he was understandably proud of being the first in his family to attend university, he did not realise that while it may not be entirely impossible for him to become a barrister, his history degree from a Post-92 university would not in itself be enough.
The narrative of an economically rational student requires that applicants have an idea of what they want to do professionally after university, and while ideally they should be able to link that to their university study, it does not –
yet – require them to have a full knowledge of that chosen career. In this narrative a statement like Bradley’s (HP92) stands out for its relative non- attachment to a future professional plan:
The most important reason for me wanting to study history is that I will be able to further my historical knowledge and interest also, the subject will help me to gain more transferable skills that I would need when applying to virtually any job for example, better communication which I will gain through presentations of my findings during my degree. It would be tempting to read resistance in Bradley’s lack of a firm career path, and while it does go against the norm of the other statements, he is arguably
being neoliberal in being open to possibility of ‘virtually any job’. This
flexibility implies that Bradley – who in interviews said he was actually hoping to go into film production – is willing to mould the ‘transferable skills’ (human capital) he gains from his university degree to fit whatever role the job market presents him with. Although he may have other ambitions he did not write about them, and while it may be ‘most important’ that he gains historical knowledge, he still feels compelled to write about how higher education will help him to invest in his human capital, even if he is not quite sure how or to what specific end. He is simply aware that it is a narrative he must conform to.