University: a costly experience for some. Photograph: Chris Young/PA
If it's true, it would certainly explain a lot: new research indicates that males with a university arts degree actually earn on average four per cent less over a lifetime than people who didn't go to university at all. This is all the more shocking when you hear that the same study shows that graduates in general earn between 20 to 25 per cent more than non-graduates.
What is it about us male arts graduates that makes us the exception to the rule? Are we a self-selecting group of ambitionless losers, or were we taught somewhere along the line that as long you could tell Doric columns from Corinthian ones, money was of no importance? I don't remember that particular lecture, but I may well have slept through it.
Of course, higher education is not, or wasn't then anyway, an option one took for purely financial reasons. I never intended to wear my BA in English as a badge of my earning potential, but I didn't imagine it would be a positive hindrance. It was always there at the top of my CV, even though I don't recall them asking too many questions about Pope's Dunciad during the interview for the car parking job. An arts degree, I soon learned, didn't even entitle me to work indoors. Mind you, valet parking is a lot more lucrative than an entry level job in publishing, and I read a lot when it wasn't busy.
I would like to be able to say that I have enjoyed the best of both worlds - I am gainfully employed, yet still vaguely aware of what litotes means - but to be honest I could really use that four per cent about now. It would come in not a little handy. And I sometimes wish I had taken a maths degree instead, so I could work out how much the extra four per cent would amount to exactly. I wonder how big a telly I could get with it.
