A hunk, a hunk of burning love

Reviewing the fortunes of creative graduates within the recent 2025 Higher Education graduate outcomes survey

Sept 2025

Elvis Presley’s final top ten hit in his lifetime was the 1972 song ‘Burning Love’. The song was first recorded by the country and soul singer Arthur Alexander who himself wrote songs that were covered by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and and the Beatles. Alexander died in 1993 after spending his latter years working as a bus driver. The overlap between the creative industries and bus driving as a career choice is not an extensive one, (I couldn’t get much further than Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday), but thanks to analysis presented in the ‘Panic - it’s an arts emergency’ report of 2018 by Dr Orian Brook, Dr David O’Brien, and Dr Mark Taylor, we can at least have an academic perspective on this interface. The report sets out responses to the question ‘Which occupations do creative workers know?’ according to 22 categories. It reports that the likelihood of those working in the creative industries having social connections with a bus driver is 25% - the second lowest (after Bank Manager).

On my bus journeys I’m currently working my way through Christopher Clark’s magnificent ‘Revolutionary Spring’. Eschewing the glib short-form of publications like Substack, he digs deep into the complex and multi-layered meanings that sit beneath the phenomena he describes in the book. However, he also sagely articulates the shortcomings of his craft. In reviewing his own analysis of the revolutions that swept Europe in the middle of the 19th century, he says ‘To follow every secession from the common enterprise in 1848-9 would be like writing the history of a fire by narrating in succession the distinctive biography of each of its flames’. The beauty of this statement is a reminder to us all, that to know is not to simply describe, but that there is a need to understand and express, while perhaps also recognising that any expression is likely to be less than what it seeks to express. As the artist Wael Shawky (as recently seen at Talbot Rice Gallery) notes, “history is a human creation”.

As a wide-eyed arts foundation student I was taught a history of art in which linear pathways of creative practice were punctuated by a procession of artistic geniuses in what appeared as a conclusive and well trodden path between the -isms that defined this world. Impressionism, cubism, fauvism, etc. all curving towards their destination of now. But in atomising creativity in this way and assigning it to categories which abstract it from its wider cultural context, we are guilty - as Christopher Clark says - of writing about a fire by the distinct biographies of its flames. The implication of the linear narrative of art was that somehow things developed in a logical manner - that they were all part of a journey towards better.

But how do we understand this idea of better - does art ever get better? - or is each generation, each community, just trying to find art that confirms and validates our place in the world . And if, as in previous times, we have appointed groups of people to locate this and re-present it to us through their work, to try to find and empower these people now.

If that is true, then who are these people, where do they come from and how do we make sure that they are the right people to be doing this for us? The dominant route in building the cultural capital that is required to assert a role in this process is to attend an institute of Higher Education, and currently about 67,000 people a year graduate from courses in the UK in what is classified as ‘Design, and creative and performing arts’ courses, with a further 50,000+ passing through the associated disciplines of media, communication and architecture.

In Scotland, the Scottish Funding Council and Creative Scotland undertook an exercise nearly 10 years ago to better understand the outcomes for the people who graduate from creative courses in our colleges and universities. To try to understand what becomes of the motivations that they had when undertaking these courses - and what is the impact of the substantial personal investment each had made. At that time HE institutions were required to undertake a process to determine the post-study outcomes for all students. This involved contacting them 6 months after they graduate to ask what they are doing. This was called the DLHE (Destination of Leavers of Higher Education) study. As you can imagine, this was a challenging task, not only tracking the graduates down, but also getting a sample size that might provide a meaningful data set; e.g. it would be safe to assume that those easiest to contact may be more likely to have achieved ‘positive destinations’. The difficult answer that was encountered at that time was that there was no evidence that either demonstrated an impact, or alternatively demonstrated no impact - we simply didn’t know as, despite the efforts of the HE staff, the exercise produced so little in the way of meaningful data.

The DLHE study was replaced in 2018 by a new survey called the ‘Graduate Outcomes survey’ which was more ambitious, seeking to generate more meaningful data by looking at outcomes 15 months after graduation. The outcomes from this survey are published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the most recent figures, published in July 2025 are based on a response rate of just under 60% of 2023 graduates. It reports against broad headings, using EU-wide NACE (Nomenclature of Economic Activities) classifications, which may mask many of the detailed variables. According to the 2023 survey the most common destination for students graduating in ‘Design and creative and performing arts’ is tied between ‘Arts, entertainment and recreation’ and ‘Wholesale and retail trade’ at 17%. The suggestion here being that creative graduates have less than a 1 in 5 chance of working in their chosen field. In a similar vein, those graduating from this area have the lowest level of being in a ‘high-skilled’ occupation and the highest level of being in a ‘low-skilled’ occupation. This data exists and tells a story, and no matter whether those of us working in creativity and culture pay heed to it, it will be read and acted on by others.

This narrative of sub-optimal prospects for creative arts graduates is reinforced by the oft cited statistics concerning earnings of artists. The Scottish Artists Union’s membership survey from 2023 states that 59% of the 420 members surveyed earn less than £9k per year and only 11% earn more than £20k per year. While this is often reported in the context of benchmarks such as the national living wage, it perhaps masks a more complex notion of how earnings relate to the concept of being ‘economically active’. It is no secret that there are very few visual artists who sustain themselves full-time through making and selling work - but also that there are many whose approach to trading in their work (and their skills) is that it is not existential - either economically or culturally. Instead it is a bonus for what for them is often described as a ‘practice’.

Linked to this is a recognition that the option to not rely on a trade in your artistic output is often dependent on being based within an economic unit that is able to sustain this (e.g. a partner/family with a more stable income). This is clearly a sensitive topic and is not widely explored in any analysis of the economics of culture, although Kathryn Welch in her 2021 project ‘The Creative Hustle - How artists make it pay’ reported one interviewee as saying ‘"It's really only in the past year that I've come to realise how many writers have either rich families or they're supported by their partners”. In a similar vein, the 2018 Craft Scotland Annual Tracking Study notes that 20% of respondents record that their income is augmented by family and friends, and concludes the report with a statement saying “Based on these responses, it could be argued that craft can be seen as a lifestyle choice and way of being, as much as it is a specific occupation”. This can be a difficult point to bring to the surface as the ‘lifestyle’ comment is often used by those outside of the creative industries to decry it as not a serious business proposition. The casual use of the relentless rhetoric of the creative industries has also driven the narrative in a way that devalues the idea that either the ‘amateur’ or the ‘economically active’ selling artist have no right to a role in our public sector interventions in support of culture and creativity. We create a stratum of support from which these areas of practice are largely excluded and work to sustain an illusory notion of the professional artist - with ‘professional’ in this context describing an attitude rather than anything to do with being paid to do what you do. However, when this is triangulated with research such as the ‘Panic - It’s an arts emergency’ report mentioned above and its examination of the class structure of creative work, a slightly different story about who is empowered and supported to constitute our creative class becomes apparent.

There is no doubt that people doing creative things is a vital part of our national and global culture and that those wishing to study should be encouraged to pursue this route. But our approach to how we sustain this currently seems very confused. We have large numbers of people who are motivated to invest significantly in the development of their own creativity through entering higher education. But for many this results into an expectation that the inherent public value that is understood to reside in their work will need to be dependent upon public (state) investment to sustain it. This concept of entitlement is played out in many of the deeply held convictions around creative working, but in turn can be resented of many by those empowered to support this working. It also reflects the conundrum that a unilateral declaration that one is an artist is key to joining the canon - but only those with the confidence and cultural capital to do this can make and sustain that claim.

The novelist Raymond Chandler said, referring to his wife, Cissy “she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at”. If the richness of our shared culture and the success of our creative economy is a flame upon which we should all be able to warm our hands, we need to enable all to contribute to it and not just to be part of a process in which only a few ever stand a chance of their hopes being made manifest.