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Quotas For Low Value Degrees

July 17, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

This morning Arts Emergency, a UK based organization which advocates for the arts & humanities and puts a lot of effort into finding mentors for young creatives, post the following on Twitter:

“Hands up who took a ‘low value degree’ & wouldn’t be where you are without it. Hands up who thinks EVERY young person should have the opportunity to do the same. Hands up who thinks higher education shouldn’t be reduced to ‘produces high earners’.”

Hands up who took a 'low value degree' & wouldn't be where you are without it. Hands up who thinks EVERY young person should have the opportunity to do the same. Hands up who thinks higher education shouldn't be reduced to 'produces high earners'. https://t.co/YordjtB6N4

— Arts Emergency (@ArtsEmergency) July 17, 2023

This was in response to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s proposal that cap the number of students universities can accept into “low value” degree programs according to The Guardian.

Courses will be capped that do not have a high proportion of graduates getting a professional job, going into postgraduate study or starting a business, the prime minister will announce on Monday.

[…]

The numbers cap is unlikely to affect the bulk of courses offered by Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, whose students tend to go on to “highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings.

Critics of the move say that it effectively penalises universities and courses with a high proportion of working-class students, who have fewer financial resources or family support and so are more likely to drop out.

“This will effectively act as a red flag to students. Who wants to apply to a ‘low value’ course?” said one vice-chancellor, who added that universities might also become more cautious over admitting students who might be less likely to graduate or want professional careers.

I don’t know if it was the enthusiasm for the topic or the low level of traffic on Twitter, but my feed was solidly filled by this topic with only a smattering of posts on other topics. It was hard to believe this wasn’t listed as trending. After scrolling and scrolling I was surprised to see I saw still on posts from seven hours prior. I began to worry I would hit the 600 post limit recently announced for people who didn’t pay to be verified before I got to the original post that started it all.

There were a lot of great responses and I probably missed some of the deeper words of wisdom in the mix, but a very clear, obvious response from Milo Harries caught my eye:

I obviously have a ton of thoughts on this, but really they boil down to:

Does anyone that has ever met me really think I’d have added more value to the world if I’d based my career decisions on money?

I obviously have a ton of thoughts on this, but really they boil down to:

Does anyone that has ever met me really think I'd have added more value to the world if I'd based my career decisions on money? https://t.co/3phIWZcyDw

— Milo Harries (@Milo_Harries) July 17, 2023

If you haven’t seen it already, a similar conversation is bouncing around in the US and I suspect other countries around the world. So it is something to which to pay attention.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, creativity, Working In The Arts

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Will Lunch Conversations & Bespoke Experiences Replace Fundraising Galas

July 12, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

A post by Jason Lewis who writes The Butterfly Effect on substack suggests taking a donor to lunch is going to be a much better investment of time and resources when it comes to doing a better job fundraising than taking a webinar on the topic.

If you really want to understand why giving is down, instead of signing up for a webinar promising an in-depth analysis by a panel of fundraising wizards, how about taking a lapsed donor out to lunch? If doing that is all but impossible because you’re too afraid to pick up the phone, you’re overwhelmed with the amount of data you’d have to sift through to identify that donor, or your boss has you panicked about tablecloths and wine for the fall gala, anything you’re going to hear in that webinar isn’t going to help.

What Lewis essentially says is that like arts and culture audiences, donors are less interested in taking a passive role with their giving and want to be more interactively engaged. An increasing number of people don’t view themselves as socialites who attend big galas and would instead like to have a closer view and relationship with the causes they are being asked to support.

The effect is an irrevocable shift from a broadcast model in which a relative few control the message to a democratized model where the message is co-created. Shirky’s insights about what it means to live in the twenty-first century is why we encourage our clients not to see themselves as master technicians attempting to manipulate and control their donor’s experience and, instead, engage their donors in ways that allow them to play active roles in creating meaningful experiences for themselves.

[…]

Our donors want to play an active role in determining what their giving experiences are; and they, more so than anyone else, are best qualified to explain to us what those experiences might look like. Arguably, the lunch table is one of the best places for having these kinds of conversations.

Based on the plug at the bottom of the post, it appears Jason Lewis is a member of a company that promotes responsive fundraising which presumably advocates for this sort of approach as part of their consulting practice.

Advocacy, Fundraising

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Will Irish Artists Sleep Better With A Guaranteed Basic Income

July 11, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

I have written before about Ireland’s plan to provide a guaranteed basic income for artists. A couple weeks ago, NBC News posted a story about the program on their website. In all, 2000 artists, including architects and circus professionals, were chosen from 8000 applicants to receive €325 ($326) a week unconditionally for three years.

There is a breakdown of artists’ disciplines and where they live in a press release the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and the Media put out in September 2022.

What caught my attention in the NBC article was the type of data the Ministry was collecting on artists who were selected and not selected for the program.

Participants have to complete a survey every six months, which asks them about their artistic output and working hours, as well as their sleeping habits and the state of their mental health. The survey also asks about their societal participation, which can include activities like volunteering and caring for relatives. A control group of artists who did not receive funding will also be surveyed and tracked to compare results of those of received funding against those who didn’t.

I would be interested to learn more about what they find from this trail program. Hopefully it will come back on my radar again in 2025-2026 when the pilot is over.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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You Can’t Measure The Value Of Arts In Dollars, But Not Having It Will Cost You

July 10, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

A couple weeks ago in The Globe & Mail, Max Wyman wrote an opinion piece declaring the value of art and culture in Canada shouldn’t just be measured by economic standards. Long time readers know this argument is a particular interest of mine.

Wyman writes:

Typically, if you can’t value the outcome in dollars, it doesn’t count. And it’s hard to show the value of art and culture on a cost-benefit graph. Even when they do come up with more cash, it’s usually for economic reasons. Just recently, for instance, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a new investment of £50-billion ($84-billion) to “grow the creative industries,” in the name of adding a million extra jobs in the country’s cultural sector by 2030.

He goes on to note that arts and cultural organizations are becoming more adept at discussing related benefits such as making communities desirable places to live and contributing to physical and mental health and well-being.

He goes on to cite a study that asked nearly 2000 visitors to 11 U.S. museums to place a value on the contribution to their well-being the museum visit had made. While they got an interesting result, it is somewhat unfortunately couched in economic terms.

…to assess the way their museum experiences improved their well-being in four categories – personal, intellectual, social and physical – and to put a price on those benefits on a sliding scale from US$0 to US$1,000. They came up with an average cash value, per individual visit, of US$905. When the study’s authors extrapolated this information on a national scale, they calculated an annual economic value of US$52-billion in public well-being for museum visitors.

I know, I know: small sample, based on entirely personal valuations. But in an interview with The Art Newspaper, Will Cary, the chief operating officer of the Barnes Foundation (which took part in the study), said the research gives funders and policy makers “a compelling, quantitative argument that thriving, well-supported cultural institutions are not ‘nice-to-haves,’ they are ‘need-to-haves’ and that the return on their investment is significant and multifaceted.”

As something of a supplement to this article, I was listening to a Wisconsin Public Radio story, (probably saw it on Artsjournal.com) where a caller (~11:45) said a company was visiting their village to determine whether they would site their company there or in NC. The caller, who said he served on the village council, said the company rep said his wife was into arts and the community and she will never live here. The caller said they basically lost a company that was going to employ 250 because they lacked an arts and culture infrastructure.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Government Relations, State of the Arts

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