Do master’s degrees help get jobs?
With degree fees on the rise and jobs in ever shorter supply, two cultural heritage students ask whether such master's degrees will really help them enter their chosen careers
We are a pair of interns working at the Museums Association (MA), taking a brief (obligatory) step out from our master’s degree in cultural heritage studies at University College London (UCL).
Like other master's courses (museums studies, public archaeology, heritage management, to name a few), cultural heritage studies comes with the (oft broken) promise of a sparkling career in museums and/or heritage. With fees on the rise and jobs in ever shorter supply, this article takes a sideways glance at the pathway to stardom that is the career-orientated arts master's and asks: are these courses worth it?
But first, a little more about us.
Kathryn: I took a rather conventional route onto this course, having completed a history BA at York. I spent much of my youth oohing and aahing my way around National Trust properties, and now, as I plot a career, it’s in those surroundings that I want to work. I have tailored my master’s towards museum and heritage site learning and interpretation, seizing the opportunity to create a shiny new children’s trail at the Geffrye Museum.
Elsewhere, I’ve been interning at the National Trust, writing interpretation for one of their properties. Plans for the future? Education and/or interpretation at a museum or heritage site. My CV’s got potential, but without teaching experience, I think I have a lot of volunteering ahead of me before those dreams become reality.
Paul: After completing a wishy-washy BA in combined arts at Durham, the equally wishy-washy ring of cultural heritage studies had tremendous appeal for me. The course is extremely flexible, and I’ve taken a less hands-on route than Kathryn, focusing my studies on landscape, memory and cultural rights. Alongside my course, I’ve spent time volunteering at the Royal Anthropological Institute: cracker-dry, but hopefully useful CV fodder.
When I finish I expect to study more, to spend the next couple of years paying for life with a shop job, and to eventually volunteer and PhD my way into a career in heritage-based development.
WHAT NEXT?
We have both hugely enjoyed the UCL course so far, but it’s a reasonable enough question to ask if, for either of us, studying cultural heritage has in any way helped towards getting a job. The short answer is “yes”, but this does need qualifying.
Kathryn: At university, I gained and practiced skills – interpretation, exhibition design, learning resources development – in double quick time. While these skills are within the grasp of those that give further study a miss, there can be no doubt that enrolment on a course has shoe-horned me into higher volunteer positions (with lots of responsibility) far more quickly than I could have otherwise hoped. Equally, when I finish, I will have the piece of paper to prove that I have those skills, rather than a yard-long paper trail of extremely limiting eight and 10-week placements.
Paul: I got my volunteering work at the RAI through a university contact. My dissertation supervisor is also proving to be willing to sing my praises to the right people at heritage organisations, and to provide me with advanced insider knowledge as jobs and opportunities for further study become available.
In short, many of the benefits of our master's course can be boiled down to simply being in the loop.
To be clear, both of us are pursuing opportunities outside of university, very much under our own steam. We feel this to be necessary and wouldn’t count on finding a job without it. So in that sense there’s arguably nothing a master's gives you that you couldn’t get yourself with a lot of hard work and patience.
Or perhaps there is one thing: passion. It’s entirely unquantifiable but many employers seem to be under the impression that having an master’s in a museum-related subject is the only indicator that an individual has got both genuine zeal for the culture sector, and the drive to sacrifice his or herself (as well as the grad-scheme, the BMW, the cottage in Provence and the family yacht) for the public good.
This is problematic, because it means that having either money (or the wherewithal and sheer nerve to take out £30,000 of loans with no security) equates to having passion. It is a grossly unfair situation, but an extremely familiar one, in which the odds are stacked in favour of the affluent.
In this light, the MA’s recent poll on the effect on the sector of rising tuition fees is telling – 87% of respondents felt that higher tuition fees would restrict access to the sector.
It seems pertinent to end this article by asking just how much an individual has to be willing to spend (and how over-qualified they are prepared to make themselves) to demonstrate that they don’t want to be in corporate finance, that they do care about the arts and that they’re more than willing to accept a starting salary of £13,000 per annum? For us, the master’s is worth it, but it isn't fair.
Like other master's courses (museums studies, public archaeology, heritage management, to name a few), cultural heritage studies comes with the (oft broken) promise of a sparkling career in museums and/or heritage. With fees on the rise and jobs in ever shorter supply, this article takes a sideways glance at the pathway to stardom that is the career-orientated arts master's and asks: are these courses worth it?
But first, a little more about us.
Kathryn: I took a rather conventional route onto this course, having completed a history BA at York. I spent much of my youth oohing and aahing my way around National Trust properties, and now, as I plot a career, it’s in those surroundings that I want to work. I have tailored my master’s towards museum and heritage site learning and interpretation, seizing the opportunity to create a shiny new children’s trail at the Geffrye Museum.
Elsewhere, I’ve been interning at the National Trust, writing interpretation for one of their properties. Plans for the future? Education and/or interpretation at a museum or heritage site. My CV’s got potential, but without teaching experience, I think I have a lot of volunteering ahead of me before those dreams become reality.
Paul: After completing a wishy-washy BA in combined arts at Durham, the equally wishy-washy ring of cultural heritage studies had tremendous appeal for me. The course is extremely flexible, and I’ve taken a less hands-on route than Kathryn, focusing my studies on landscape, memory and cultural rights. Alongside my course, I’ve spent time volunteering at the Royal Anthropological Institute: cracker-dry, but hopefully useful CV fodder.
When I finish I expect to study more, to spend the next couple of years paying for life with a shop job, and to eventually volunteer and PhD my way into a career in heritage-based development.
WHAT NEXT?
We have both hugely enjoyed the UCL course so far, but it’s a reasonable enough question to ask if, for either of us, studying cultural heritage has in any way helped towards getting a job. The short answer is “yes”, but this does need qualifying.
Kathryn: At university, I gained and practiced skills – interpretation, exhibition design, learning resources development – in double quick time. While these skills are within the grasp of those that give further study a miss, there can be no doubt that enrolment on a course has shoe-horned me into higher volunteer positions (with lots of responsibility) far more quickly than I could have otherwise hoped. Equally, when I finish, I will have the piece of paper to prove that I have those skills, rather than a yard-long paper trail of extremely limiting eight and 10-week placements.
Paul: I got my volunteering work at the RAI through a university contact. My dissertation supervisor is also proving to be willing to sing my praises to the right people at heritage organisations, and to provide me with advanced insider knowledge as jobs and opportunities for further study become available.
In short, many of the benefits of our master's course can be boiled down to simply being in the loop.
To be clear, both of us are pursuing opportunities outside of university, very much under our own steam. We feel this to be necessary and wouldn’t count on finding a job without it. So in that sense there’s arguably nothing a master's gives you that you couldn’t get yourself with a lot of hard work and patience.
Or perhaps there is one thing: passion. It’s entirely unquantifiable but many employers seem to be under the impression that having an master’s in a museum-related subject is the only indicator that an individual has got both genuine zeal for the culture sector, and the drive to sacrifice his or herself (as well as the grad-scheme, the BMW, the cottage in Provence and the family yacht) for the public good.
This is problematic, because it means that having either money (or the wherewithal and sheer nerve to take out £30,000 of loans with no security) equates to having passion. It is a grossly unfair situation, but an extremely familiar one, in which the odds are stacked in favour of the affluent.
In this light, the MA’s recent poll on the effect on the sector of rising tuition fees is telling – 87% of respondents felt that higher tuition fees would restrict access to the sector.
It seems pertinent to end this article by asking just how much an individual has to be willing to spend (and how over-qualified they are prepared to make themselves) to demonstrate that they don’t want to be in corporate finance, that they do care about the arts and that they’re more than willing to accept a starting salary of £13,000 per annum? For us, the master’s is worth it, but it isn't fair.