Students shun humanities at university for job-oriented course

Updated on: Monday, August 15, 2011

Students in Britain are increasingly shunning traditional arts and humanities courses at universities in favor of job-oriented subjects, according to government figures.

The numbers of applications to study subjects like law, teaching and accounting at British universities have increased this year, while interest in courses in English, history,classics and philosophy has fallen, the figures reveal.

In fact, data about this year's applications from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service shows the biggest rise is in the numbers wanting to do teaching-related degrees, with 95,172 applications, an increase of 8.2 per cent on last year, 'The Sunday Telegraph' reported.

Other increasingly popular courses are in career-focused areas like law, up 4.8 per cent, with 123,134 applications, and business administration studies, which includes subjects such as accounting and marketing up 6.5 per cent to 331332.

Those falling in popularity are linguistics and classics subjects including English which fell by 4.1 per cent to 71,577 applications, as well as history, archaeology, theology and philosophy courses which are grouped together and are down 1.7 per cent to 83,331 applications.

Applications for European language courses are also falling (by 0.6 per cent), but interest in non-European languages has increased (by 0.2 per cent), the figures reveal. Prof Geoffrey Alderman, of the University of Buckingham and senior figure in higher education, said: "As students are having to pay more for university education, they are behaving like consumers and looking for what returns they will get for the investments they are making.

Students shun humanities at university for job-oriented course

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