bigideas

Quite a few blogs have picked up on “news” that a philosophy degree may not make you unemployable, suggesting that — phew — it might not be a “worthless” qualification after all. But what is the value of a philosophy education, and how is it perceived in the commercial job market?

As Philosophy, Etc points out, the story isn’t actually that a philosophy degree is a good choice if you want a highly-paid job in industry; it’s that it’s just not quite as bad a choice as it used to be. But nobody, I think, chooses to study philosophy, or any other arts subject, purely as a financial investment.

Let’s see how smart that would be. According to Manchester Metropolitan University (selected at random), the average graduate (across all subjects) can expect to earn £160k more than the average non-graduate.

Now, of course, a degree isn’t free. It costs fees and the lost opportunity for income. It costs £3070 per year to attend MMU (here). Now say if you didn’t go to college you could make £5,000 a year net doing a job that required only “A”-levels, excluding cost of living.

So your total cost of a 3-year college degree is £24,210. Let’s say that instead of going to college you invest that cash in treasury bonds paying the Bank of England base rate minus 100bps (4.75%) for the 40 years over which we’re amortising the degree’s value. The risk associated with such an investment is vanishingly small (basically, you’ll lose your money only if the UK government becomes bankrupt).

Your savings on retirement would be £154,937, or about the £160k you didn’t earn because you didn’t have a degree.

I promise I didn’t pick the figures above to make it come out that way, it just did. And I know there are a lot of assumptions in there. As a back-of-a-napkin calculation, though, it doesn’t look like the degree adds a fantastic amount to the return on investment.

Now, you don’t get the 160k in earnings all at the end; you get them over the course of your life, and money obtained earlier is worth more than money obtained later, a concept referred to as the time value of money.

So yes, the graduate does make a bit more than the prudent non-graduate in terms of value. It’s the difference between getting a lump sum on retirement and having the same amount doled out to you throughout your life. And yes, I know the comparison is extremely artificial, but as a rough hand-waving idea of the expected financial return on a college degree it doesn’t make me want to invest.

People don’t go to college as a pure financial investment, any more than they go to work purely for the monthly salary. How much you like the work you do, how much choice you have in your career, how much prestige is attached to it and so on are among the many non-monetary considerations that affect whether you like your job. And it’s those kinds of benefits, I think, that a college degree probably enhances far more than the size of your salary.

And, of course, outside the duties of your job we expect some improvement in your quality of life just as a result of having learned stuff. That’s especially true if, like many people associated with Big Ideas, you retain an interest in academic matters when you leave campus.

Now, an addendum. Because I do think that philosophy courses that want to attract more career-oriented students could do one very simple thing to enhance their reputation.

Not having a vaguely “quantitative” degree rules out a lot of job options. Many philosophy grads just don’t think they can apply for jobs in technology or finance, say, because they don’t have confidence that they can learn mathematical and mathematics-related skills. It also means they’re not well-prepared for the kinds of questions they’ll be asked in interviews, or indeed the kinds of skills they’ll be expected to develop early on in their first job.

More formal logic and a basic grounding in mathematics on a BA philosophy course would give its grads a huge benefit in the job market. Surely an undergraduate philosopher could learn as much logic as a computer scientist does? But show me just one who learned about the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra, say, and therefore has some understanding of the algebraic structure of classical logic. Why couldn’t philosophers learn that sort of material?

Such a mathematical component shouldn’t be one of those things students are forced to learn because it’s good for them, over and above their “proper” courses. Logic and mathematics are both traditional subjects of philosophy, and also tools philosophers use to do their work.

Why don’t colleges do this? I don’t know. Maybe maths-related courses are perceived as difficult and students don’t want to take them, although I would think a course in, say, axiomatic set theory would be significantly more accessible, at least for some students, than one on Kant. Maybe it’s hard to find people to teach such things, although postgrads from the maths department could be readily recruited. But whatever the reason, I think it’s a pity, because the story for philosophy graduates could be a lot rosier than it is, and that could mean the story for philosophy departments was too.