A government initiative has been launched today seeking to prepare soon-to-be arts graduates for what they ought expect when they leave college – a life-time of unemployment.
“We’ve been chastised for this policy perhaps being overly fatalistic with regard to arts students’ life prospects,” said Mr. Huffhog, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, “But we find that criticism unwarranted. Instead, we prefer to look at it as helping these misguided fools students through a process of, what we like to call ‘expectation management’.” When asked to elaborate further on what he meant by ‘expectation management’, he said “Well basically we ask them how they expect they’ll manage to find a job after college with an arts degree.”
Under the new legislation all Irish arts degrees will be forced to introduce two mandatory 5 credit modules for all final year students. The first module, provisionally entitled ‘Dole-Queueing: Understanding Its Context In Theory’, will encourage students to theoretically dissect what queuing for the dole really means, as well as analysing the broader cultural context of what it means to sign-on. The second module is a practical module, and will involve each of the students being sent to stand outside a post office on a cold January Thursday morning.
As part of the practical module, students will be taught things such as ‘appropriate queuing posture’; how to create a suitable playlist for when you’re queuing, and how to overcome the cruel social stigma of telling people that you are an arts graduate.
Students have been reacting against the announcement, denouncing it as ‘crass’ and ‘disparaging’. “I believe this is completely unfair on us,” railed James Finley, a 3rd year English Literature student in UCD, “Rather than berating students for their choice of college course and saying that none of us will ever get a job, the government should be working to try create more jobs for arts graduates. Or, indeed, they should be looking to try combat the systemic problems in our economy that have led to such a dearth of well-paid jobs for graduates in the first place.”
When we asked Mr. Finley what exactly he meant by ‘systemic problems in our economy’ he replied, “Well… I’m not quite sure, I don’t have an economics degree. Which is another reason why my careers prospects are so poor.”
