BA beats BCOM's ass anyday. (Opinion Piece)

It is a common assumption that doing a Bachelor of Arts (BA) at university is a waste and it will never get you that job where you earn almost R20 000 a month. All a BA teaches you is how to think critically, be lateral minded and write a 1500 word essay the night before. They also say that BA is the easiest degree at any University and that BA students are the ones who are living the good life since they don’t write five tests a week like their fellow Bachelor of Commerce (BCOM) students. They say that the matriculates who don’t achieve those distinctions at the end of those glorious twelve years go the BA root because they don’t have the points to do the ultimate degrees that lead to the obvious job positions in medicine, commerce and engineering.

Now you’re probably thinking who that ‘they’ is. There is no ‘they’ really these are all common assumptions that you hear through the grape vine about the devastating mistake you’re going to make if you decide to do a BA at University. Being a BA student I find that these assumptions are merely just assumptions. The ideology that a BA is a waste come from those who never studied a BA and are probably just jealous of our bravery to take on the degree that does not guarantee a job at the end of the road. Jokes about BA and their lack of financial benefit are numerous in quantity. Here’s just a taste of people’s naivety:

Q: What is the difference between a BA and a pizza?
A: A pizza can feed a family of four.

Now the above joke just illustrates people’s stupidity when it comes to their views on BA and its financial prosperity. Don’t get me wrong I also laughed at this joke though I felt terribly guilty afterwards. But in actual fact doing a BA is not a waste and the very reason that you think it is does not make you worthy of even reading this post. The truth is as you enrol in the BA you may be wondering what career paths are open to you. There are many jokes about the alleged uselessness of a BA because it is easy to see where a degree in engineering, nursing or commerce might lead but less obvious for Arts. In fact an Arts degree is, in many ways, the most valuable of all and BA students have one of the highest rates of post-graduation employment. There are limited openings for people with highly specialised degrees but BA graduates are not limited by narrow specialisation. The employability of Arts graduates is a reflection of the skills they acquire during their study and this needs to be more widely acknowledged.

Robert Reich, a distinguished American economist, was asked to identify the skills that would serve people well in the first decade of the twenty-first century. He suggested that people who could think in abstract terms, who had well developed conceptual abilities, who could think critically, who could analyse problems and create solutions, who had general research skills and who could communicate effectively would almost certainly be the most employable. He might have been describing the skills fostered during a BA. When employers consider a BA graduate for a job they know that the person has a range of skills and has applied them successfully. Employers today are looking for flexibility in their staff, they expect to retrain them for the particular task they want them to do, and that is why are looking for people who are intellectually flexible, have analytical minds and good communication skills. A student with a BA has shown they can think for themselves, can acquire and process information, can communicate their thoughts effectively and exercise initiative. That is exactly what employers are looking for and no career is closed to BA graduates. As Janet Holmes a Court told the Financial Review, for her company, "Arts graduates make the best employees".

To add on to the fact that the BA is in fact a great ‘employment degree’ (if you may call it that) it also is a lot more fun than those other boring degrees like a BCOM and a BPHARM (Bachelor of Pharmacy, shame their lives must suck counting pills for a living). There are a range of BA subjects that cater to your every interest and they are most of the time not tedious like economics or human kinetics.

So the next time you hear that BA stands for BUGGA ALL, or as my aunt may call it BATHA ACADEMIA, tell those idiots to do the research themselves before they start passing judgements.