If you want to study arts, subsidise a scientist

In this age of austerity can such sums be justified? The audio project may be small, but we’re counting the pennies. As George Osborne prepares his autumn raid on departmental coffers, how safe should the £3.2 billion science budget be? The Pre-Budget Report in December lopped £600 million from higher education and science and research funding in 2012-13; will Slasher Osborne go even farther? He must resist, for all our sakes.

In his Reith Lecture this week, Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, argued convincingly that the UK’s standing in the world, both economically and intellectually, depends on “sustaining our edge as discoverers and innovators”.

There has been much talk about rebalancing the UK economy, and how commerce built from the fruits of our scientific and technological knowhow could, and should, challenge the finance sector’s dominance. Yet talk is all we have. What we do not have is any coherent policy to foster the next generation of scientists, pay for their research, encourage them into teaching or support them in any way.

In evidence to a Commons select committee this year it emerged that more than one in four schools cannot offer physics A level because of a shortage of teachers. This shaming fact emerged with barely a whimper, when it should have caused an outpouring of national rage and reproach. Last year 25,643 pupils sat physics A level, down from about 45,000 in the late 1980s. Only a pathetic 5,628 were girls. Who needs physicists, however, when we have 30,537 kids with business studies A levels, not to mention 49,743 with psychology credentials?

As the world’s intellectual and economic capital shifts towards Asia, the humanities bias in schools and popular culture is beginning to look dangerous.

Are they quaking in Beijing, do you think, at the thought of the 25,034 British kids who passed A levels in media studies last year? Perhaps the Chinese have qualms that they’re getting it wrong, pouring all that cash into science and engineering education.

Damn, they think (in Mandarin). Our kids know how to split an atom, but those clever youngsters in the UK can critically appraise regional identity and sexuality in TV drama — where did we go wrong?

In the UK, we need to think radically. The key, as ever, is education. The independent review into higher education funding, headed by Lord Browne of Madingley, is widely expected to recommend an end to the cap on tuition fees when it reports later in the year.

The end of the cap is likely to mean that a humanities degree from a leading university will cost £7,000 a year and a science degree £14,000. That price disparity is unlikely to persuade more of our bright young things into the sciences. Medicine will suffer even more, with degrees costing up to an eye-watering £20,000 a year.

It costs more to educate scientists because they do more work and need more equipment. A disclaimer here. I read history, and relished the running — and true — joke about the disparities in workload.

Besides, you do not need a degree in the arts to work in the arts. Nowadays you need a well-placed godparent and a parental subsidy to manage the endless work experience. Another bonus is someone to tell you at the age of 16 that media studies is to media jobs what chocolate is to teapots.

Anyone can educate themselves in history or English. You do not need to be an actual student to lounge about in your pyjamas, eating super-noodles and reading — it’s how I spent most of my twenties. You do, however, need to be taught science, and to have a relevant degree to work in the field.

The answer is to feed an element of social utility into the tuition fee structure. Degrees should be ranked according to their usefulness, with medicine, engineering, maths and the sciences congregating near the top; law and economics in a slightly anomalous middle ground; and English and history languishing at the bottom, marginally above anything involving horses or surfing. Fees should change according to utility. A side-effect is likely to be an inversely proportionate relationship between the amount you pay and the amount of work you do.

Those who want to do a humanities degree will have to be really passionate and have a properly thought-out plan about how to turn it into a reasonable salary. There are already degree ghettos for the kids of the overprivileged; history of art for the trustafarian who was once accidentally moved by a Manet; agricultural studies for the dim scions of the rural wealthy. Let’s make them pay for it.

If we don’t act, we will fall into a vicious spiral — fewer students will be able to afford science degrees, which will mean even fewer science teachers and fewer enthused and engaged children. We must also provide the cash for postgraduate research, so all our best scientific and mathematical brains are not siphoned off in to the City, lured to banks where they devise ever more complicated equations for turning derivatives into bonuses. This includes continued and enthusiastic support for the LHC — complete with sound effects.

There is a danger that we would lose an appreciation of learning for its own sake by artificially skewing the economics of higher education to subsidise scientists. But this is a lesser evil than our present trajectory, which will bring a generation equipped with the soft skills of a cuddly humanities degree watching bewildered as the lab-coated Asian tiger powers past.