The Philosophers' Cocoon

By Ten-Herng Lai

So I read this article that says that most degrees in the UK are not “low-value” degrees, in the sense that most full-time employed graduates find their work meaningful — data collected within 15 months of their graduation.

Brophy, S., Christie, F., & Scurry, T. (2025). Field of study and the subjective labour market outcomes of UK graduates: examining meaningful work, career progression, and skills utilisation. Studies in Higher Education, 1-14.

https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2025.2492799

I think this article is rather refreshing: Instead of focusing on income, it evaluates three different subjective factors: whether graduates find work meaningful, whether they feel that their careers are on track, and whether they feel that they are utilising the skills learned during their undergraduate studies. There’s of course still some risk of value capture, i.e. C. Thi Nguyen’s worry that we reduce values into indexes and pursue the indexes rather than the values. That being said, there still seems to be something we may ponder together.

The bright side seems to be that 79.3% of graduates of historical and philosophical studies find their work meaningful, and 68.3% feel that their careers are on track. (Unfortunate for the purpose of our discussion, the data puts historical and philosophical studies as one group; so the title is a bit misleading.) Yet, less than half (48.7%) of these graduates respond positively to the question “I am utilising what I learned during my studies in my current work,” lowest among all groups. (It is of course possible that the negative responses all come from the historians, but I don’t think this is extremely likely…)

So let’s suppose that, similar to historians, less than half of the philosophy graduates believe that the skills they’ve learned during their undergraduate studies are being utilised at work. Is this a problem? In a sense, yes, as if the administrative overlords focus on job readiness, then even if they don’t know the science, it’s bad luck philosophers. And this scares me a bit. But instead of being frightened on my own, I’d like to do some thinking, hopefully together with my fellow philosophers.

How would you read this data? As starters, here are some possibilities that might or might not have practical implications:

1. We don’t expect to train our undergraduates with any transferable skills.
2. We thought philosophy has many transferable skills, but apparently not.
3. We thought philosophy has many transferable skills, but students haven’t learned them well.
4. We thought philosophy has many transferable skills. Students have learned them, but they don't believe they have. Maybe they’ve learned a bit too much skepticism. So we need better marketing.
5. Amazing! Philosophy is useless, but almost half of our graduates believe that they’ve learned transferable skills.
6. The only thing I know is that I know no transferable skills.
7. If only employers knew how awesome philosophy graduates are, the latter would be hired into awesome jobs that would utilise philosophical skills.
8. We should encourage research that focuses on things that make philosophy look better, as philosophy has values irreducible to income or the above three indexes.

…

And again, some limitations: this is just a survey on graduates 15 months out of university who are employed full-time. And the data is collected in the UK, so not necessarily generalisable. (“We limited our analysis to graduates who: (1) were domiciled in the UK prior to entering HE; (2)obtained their first degree in the 2018/19 academic year; and (3) reported being in full-time UK employment” (p. 4).) The numbers were from the “Supplemental Appendix” at the end of the article.