04 August 2003

Here's an old truism: Arts students 'die young', suggests a recent study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. I shudder to think what the current results would be.

A few caveats to add to the report:

-- Arts students do tend to be an undisciplined lot, and they tend to collide their academic worlds with their social worlds more than those in other fields.
-- Arts students tend not only to come from lower-income families, but they also have to spend more of their adult lives in lower-income situations, in part because of the general underfunding of arts programmes in comparison with the medical and scientific fields; further students with Arts degrees tend to earn less than their colleagues do in comparable positions.
-- There are a lot of idiot arts students, people who really shouldn't have been accepted into university in the first place, and who study 'generally' rather than methodically. Such idiots are more likely to do stupid things.

and, one last addition, he says cueing the band behind him,

"Only the good die young! Only the good...."

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