Choose a degree you love says UCAS Chief Executive

Never mind the job prospects, follow your star when choosing degree, teenagers told

 

Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of Ucas

 

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  Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of Ucas

Greg Hurst Education Editor

Last updated at 12:01AM, May 24 2013

Students should follow their hearts as well as their heads when picking a degree course, according to the head of university admissions.
Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas), warned teenagers not to choose a subject on the basis that it might lead to a good job. This might mean ignoring the wishes of parents and teachers, she said.
“It is one of the things that concerns me in the new fee regime,” Ms Curnock Cook said. “If applicants are thinking about progression to higher education as a transaction, perhaps they might make some decisions that they might regret in the future.
“I am a passionate advocate of people following both head and heart when they make decisions about higher education. If you just make a rational decision on your degree course’s ability to support a fantastic high-paid career, but you end up spending three years struggling to really engage with your course and your subject, you are probably not going to enjoy it, get the most out of it or even, potentially, do as well as you could do.”
Medicine and law, prime examples of courses seen as stepping stones to highly-paid careers, have surged in popularity, making them among the most competitive for places. Languages degrees, in particular, have slumped in popularity while many arts and humanities courses have experienced falling demand.
A large survey published by the Higher Education Policy Institute and Which? last week showed that 32 per cent of undergraduates might have chosen a different subject had they known more in advance about its academic demands. In its own survey of applicants last year, before they arrived on campus, Ucas found that 63 per cent were very confident they had made the right choice, 34 per cent were fairly confident and 4 per cent had grave doubts. But their main reasons for going to university, cited by 81 per cent, was that they wanted to study at a higher level.
“Some young adults making that decision perhaps hadn’t realised how big the decision is and perhaps make the decision too lightly,” Ms Curnock Cook said. “Part of it is understanding how a good degree in almost any subject or course gives you significant transferrable skills in almost any breadth of career and I think that remains true. There is perhaps a mood music that that is not as true as it used to be.”
Being taught to think at a high level, address problems, work in groups, influence people, research issues and make decisions were highly prized skills that benefited from passion for the subject, she said. “Those transferrable skills remain true and some of the great employers absolutely recognise that and want those skills from their graduate employees.
“The big accounting firms will take a huge proportion of their graduate intake for accountancy from people who have all sorts of degree backgrounds,” she said.
Ucas research shows that parents have a huge influence over their children’s choice of degree, along with friends and teachers. But she said teenagers should pick courses that they themselves wanted to study. “As a parent your natural instinct is to want the best for your child and to want it to be something you could recognise as being a route through life and their career that is a nice sure path,” Ms Curnock Cook said.
“But I still maintain that the most successful outcome for any young adult making this decision is to be engaging with a course that they are just really excited about — they are going to be engaging with this course and this subject area week in, week out for three and sometimes four years. If you’re not passionate about it, it’s hard to get the best out of it.”