Browned off?

 Imagine for a moment you are the manager of a theatre with an annual Arts Council subsidy of £300,000. As a result of a year-long Government review you are told that 85% of your subsidy is being withdrawn. Instead of subsidising your theatre, the Government has decided to pay your subsidy through your audience. So instead of paying an average of £20 a ticket, the audience will now have to pay nearly £60 a ticket. But it’s ok, the Government is going to loan them the ticket money. Your audience can pay back the accumulated ticket debt over 30 years, and they don’t start repaying the loan until they earn more than £21,000. What impact might this have on your audience numbers, your relationship with them or your programming? Far fetched? What I’ve described is what is being proposed as the future method of funding higher education. And it could be even tougher: arts and humanities courses stand to lose most of their funding for teaching. Apart from commiserating with a sector facing far higher cuts than the arts, why should you as an arts manager be worried?

NURTURING GROWTH
When I started my arts career in 1978 there was, I recall, just one postgraduate arts management course. There are now at least 35 BAs in Arts Management (including joint honours degrees) and a further 35 MAs. This does not include business and marketing degree courses or museum studies, all of which may provide degree pathways. I can’t give you a figure for the annual number of arts management graduates these specialist courses produce, but the Arts and Event Management course I teach on currently has 127 students with an intake of nearly 50 a year. Collectively, these specialist courses could be producing as many as 700 graduates a year. The increase in the number of arts management degree courses reflects growing interest and aids the sector’s professionalism. And, as the management of the arts becomes more complex and demanding, through competition, technology and scale, so the sector needs a better trained workforce.

SLASH AND BURN
So what impact might increasing student fees have on recruiting students? That’s the £9,000 question. Student fees are currently £3,290 a year and under Browne’s proposals, they would rise to at least £7,000 with a possibility of £9,000 a year. Fee repayment is estimated by Browne to be £30 a month if you earn £25,000, rising to £143 for people earning £40,000.

Browne’s proposals are quite clever. Vice chancellors and civil servants have been saying privately that the HE funding system needs an overhaul. On the one hand, vice chancellors want additional revenue to cover the real and increasing costs of HE and to expand. On the other, politicians want to reduce what HE requires in state borrowing. Browne has had to find a way of bridging political principles – that education should be a key means of social mobility, and thus affordable – and student and parental anxiety of finishing a degree course with burdens of debt. The higher the fees and risk of debt, potentially the narrower the social intake and mix. So a government-backed loan scheme with generous repayment terms is a clever option, though it hasn’t stopped a wave of protest. Whether Browne’s proposals will affect the arts depends both on the fee levels that universities are allowed to and decide to set, and the impact on those when considered against likely salary levels that graduates might expect.

NUMBER CRUNCHING
We surveyed all the jobs advertised with salaries in AP over the past seven months. This amounts to 141 jobs, with an average salary of around £26,842. However, 27 (19%) were part time, most of these being for three days a week. Taking this into account, the average salary falls to around £25,217. The 141 salaries surveyed ranged from £5,200 to £45,000 with a mid-point of £24,000. Our research is rough and ready and only includes jobs advertised in AP; it may omit jobs carrying higher salaries which are advertised elsewhere. Of the jobs we surveyed, 47% were below the UK average salary of £23,450. However, they are paid well enough for a majority of those we surveyed to fall into Browne’s proposed £21,000 loan repayment threshold.

Will Browne’s proposals affect arts management? What’s at stake is whether potential arts management students will be willing to risk incurring a student debt of maybe £35,000 for relatively low salary prospects, or whether they will look at other career possibilities. It’s a lifestyle choice that may not affect graduate numbers. But the decision may come down to how wealthy and accommodating your parents are. Browne may price talent out of the sector.