"So, what's next?"

“So, what’s next?”

The question that cannot be answered.

I don’t know what’s next. I wish people would stop asking me.
My recently completed degree, I have discovered, is nothing more than a stepping stone; a thing that will enable me to achieve greater and more substantive things. A Career. Bad news for a girl who shudders at the words graduate programme,vibrant and self-starter.

I know that someone is coming at education from a wildly different angle to mine when they ask: “Oh, International Relations. What can you do with that?” As if it were a bionic arm. In fact I studied International Relations not because, as some will immediately assume, I desire to become a diplomat. Nor did I become involved in any extra-curricular activities because, as many have commented, they “look good on your CV.”

No, I made my academic choices based on a commitment to understand inequality, a naïve desire to do good in the world, and a significant element of narcissistic self-reflexive interrogation. “I am an international relation!” I rather embarrassingly wrote in my UCAS statement. My two dissertations – the culmination of nearly three years of study – were essentially attempts to grapple with the contradictions of my own identity. (The first being an investigation into being Liberal and being Muslim; the second being ostensibly an examination of the power relationships implicit in travel from rich countries to poor, which ended up being an examination of my own personal crisis, or, How to be half English and half Malay, half rich and half poor, half guilty and half innocent.)

“So, what’s next?” Implicit in the question, of course, is the notion that each of our individual lives is a trajectory with its own telos. I am heading somewhere. In order to get there I must accumulate skills and qualifications to then list on my CV; a document that is really nothing more than a brochure with which I can sell myself to prospective employers.

“So, what’s next?” smacks of an underlying careerism that is not new, but certainly appears more potent at present than it was in the past. I see it as part of a broader trend towards the neoliberalisation of educational institutions and, concomitantly, of our understanding of education’s place in society. The development of universities, increasingly a process directed by those at the managerial level, has begun to take a more sinister turn. Resources are poured into income-generating departments (i.e. those that attract the most international students) at the expense of less profitable ones; and research becomes subject to a competitive logic that diminishes both academic autonomy and teaching quality.

At the level of individual students, tuition fees are recast as a reasonable ‘investment’ in one’s future, redefining education in the process. No longer a pursuit inspired by the noble spirit of academic enquiry; education is now understood in instrumentalist terms according to a logic of competition and profit. What will give the best returns on my original investment? Which degree is the most employable? Which will provide me with the most marketable skills?

“So, what’s next?”

I don’t know. And I’m keeping it that way.