KEMI Badenoch wants to curb English degrees due to their ‘poor graduate outcomes’. But she should realise there are many excellent reasons to do them. Like these:
Hot girls with rich dads do it
University is as much about meeting new people and broadening your horizons as it is preparing you for the job market. And who better to meet than single, nubile hotties with fathers who could set you up for life? The most challenging part of the course isn’t Ulysses, it’s deciding which one to settle down with in a loving parasitic relationship.
Your parents won’t pester you for three years
Parents respect English Literature as a degree choice because they know it could lead to you becoming a teacher. This means they’ll leave it until you graduate before starting the relentless nagging about what you intend to do with your life. Fortunately Eng Lit hones your bullshitting skills, so you can fob them off with some vague notions of going into marketing even as you’re moving back into your childhood bedroom and wondering what’s for dinner.
It’s piss-easy
Physics and Mathematics are properly difficult degrees that require memorising complicated formulas and theorems, whereas you can easily get a first in English Literature by waffling on about any old bollocks. Freudian symbolism in Beowulf? It’s tenuous speculation at best, but ChatGPT won’t know that while it’s rattling off your dissertation in two minutes so you can go down the pub.
There’s minimal contact time
You’re looking at 15 hours contact time tops, and most of that will be lectures you can skip anyway. This will free up time for the wider splendours of university life, such as getting pissed at 10am and watching movies all day in your pants. That’s well worth getting into massive debt for, and when you think about it, £44,690 is pretty good value for a three-year holiday.
You’re incapable of doing anything else
Do you lack the intelligence to go into STEM and the practicality to do a much more lucrative apprenticeship? That’s why English Literature degrees were invented, to hide your mediocrity. Even if you develop close reading skills, they’ll be completely unappreciated in a world where people celebrate AI-generated slop. But on the upside you get a fancy certificate to make you feel superior when you get your boiler fixed by a plumber on three times your salary.
