"Jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings"?
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Richard Adams and Subrey Allegretti, "Sunak to force English universities to cap numbers of students on ‘low-value’ degrees", The Guardian 7/14/2023:
Rishi Sunak will force universities to limit the number of students taking “low-value” degrees in England, a measure which is most likely to hit working class and black, Asian and minority ethnic applicants.
Courses will be capped that do not have a high proportion of graduates getting a professional job, going into postgraduate study or starting a business, the prime minister will announce on Monday. […]
The numbers cap is unlikely to affect the bulk of courses offered by Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, whose students tend to go on to “highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings.
The intended meaning is clear, but Philip Taylor, who sent in the link, suggests there's something off about the phrase "requiring a degree and above-average earnings". And I agree.
But the cited jobs do plausibly require a degree, if only as a condition of hiring. And perhaps they also in some sense require above-average earnings, for reasons of supply and demand. So what's the problem?
It seems to be a question of who or what is requiring what from whom. The employers are the ones requiring a degree — they would probably be happy to pay below-average salaries. And the employees are the ones requiring higher salaries — they would probably be happy to take the jobs without bothering with the degree. (Though there are other reasons to spend time in academia…) The jobs themselves don't really require either degrees or earnings levels, though by hypothesis they're associated with both.
At least, that's the best analysis I can offer on the spot — commenters may have better ideas. Someone may also be able to provide a term for semantic-role confusion of this kind, whether or not it's the source of the problem in this particular phrase.
Note — Americans may not be familiar with the the "Russell Group", which Wikipedia explains "is a self-selected association of twenty-four public research universities in the United Kingdom".
Since Sunak is prime minister of the UK, I also wonder whether the proposed rules only apply to institutions in England, not those in other UK countries. Perhaps it's because of country-specific regulation of education? If so, why not make analogous proposals for other UK regulatory bodies?
Update — Jarek Weckwerth's analysis seems correct. The writers intended "above-average earnings" to be the complement of "(go on) to", not "requiring":
whose students tend to go on to
[[“highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree] and [above-average earnings]]
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 15, 2023 @ 7:58 am
To me, the problem is temporal. The jobs require a degree, yes, but the earnings only come after you get the job, i.e. they are not a requirement in the strict sense. (Unless you go with the anti-meritocracy argument that they require high earnings from your parents.)
In other words, it's a syntactic distinction of which consituent the last NP is attached to: go on to [“highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree] and [above-average earnings], or requiring [a degree] and [above-average earnings].
Ed Rorie said,
July 15, 2023 @ 8:05 am
It might be better to say “… jobs requiring a degree and PROVIDING above-average earnings."
Mark Liberman said,
July 15, 2023 @ 8:09 am
@Ed Rorie: It might be better to say “… jobs requiring a degree and PROVIDING above-average earnings."
Indeed. No LLOG post in that case. But the question remains, what (if anything) is really wrong with the Guardian's version?
Michael P said,
July 15, 2023 @ 8:14 am
The first-order objection to the sentence as written is that there's no correct verb for the object clause "above-average earnings". Neither "jobs above-average earnings" nor "jobs requiring above-average earnings" makes sense.
But the grammatical correctness is saved by a different parse, as provided in Jared's second paragraph above.
Harry Campbell said,
July 15, 2023 @ 8:19 am
Quick note for non-Brits: the Russell Group is often described as a (recently-invented, 1994) parallel to the Ivy League. The Russell Group universities are not all in England, but education is a "devolved matter", meaning one in which the devolved regions (Scotland, Wales, N Ireland) have autonomy, and these regulations will presumably apply only to English universities.
Taylor, Philip said,
July 15, 2023 @ 8:20 am
Ah yes, "[“highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree] and [above-average earnings]" is indeed a possible parsing (and clearly the intended one) but that parsing escaped me at first sight, whence my forwarding of the link to Mark.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 15, 2023 @ 8:30 am
@Mark Liberman: Indeed. No LLOG post in that case. But the question remains, what (if anything) is really wrong with the Guardian's version?
Strictly speaking, nothing. It's a garden path sentence. Two parses are possible, and Philip Taylor agrees that the second parse had eluded him.
Terry K. said,
July 15, 2023 @ 9:34 am
I understood, on first reading, the point that the jobs have above average wages, but I don't think I actually got the parsing right. The incorrect parsing was definitely very salient and it distractingly contrasted with what I understood to be the meaning.
Philip Anderson said,
July 15, 2023 @ 4:25 pm
Education, including higher education, is indeed devolved in the UK, and so universities in the constituent countries are funded by the different governments through their own national bodies. The UK Government can only influence funding decisions in England, and any “analogous proposals” could only come from the devolved governments (which is unlikely given their opposing philosophies). But since immigration is not devolved, the UK Government CAN control which foreign students get visas, and for which courses.
Philip Anderson said,
July 15, 2023 @ 4:33 pm
And all British universities depend on fees from overseas students.
News reports are sometimes difficult to interpret, since journalists aren’t always clear about which countries are affected, and probably don’t know or care themselves; “this country” is a popular phrase with politicians and journalists.
Thomas Rees said,
July 15, 2023 @ 6:15 pm
Surely “Oxbridge” is subsumed under the Russell Group
JPL said,
July 16, 2023 @ 1:44 am
"Philip Taylor, who sent in the link, suggests there's something off about the phrase "requiring a degree and above-average earnings". And I agree."
"But the question remains, what (if anything) is really wrong with the Guardian's version?"
It's a syntactically ambiguous sentence, with two different possible syntactic structures underlying the one string of (perceivable) forms. (1. Students go on to NP1 and NP2; 2. Students go on to jobs that require NP3 and NP2.) What's making the ambiguity possible is the post-modifier "requiring a degree", which biases toward the dominant interpretation (2), and distracts from the intended interpretation (1), although both syntactic structures are grammatical. The obvious repairs are to move the modifier to pre-modifier position (",,, highly skilled, degree-requiring jobs …"), or to repeat the preposition "to" before the final NP (… and to above-average earnings.")
What's interesting is that semantically the ambiguity involves a shift in "point of view" in the case of (2). In English, subject position for an NP indicates the "point of view" on an "observed" situation, a metaphorical "eye"; independently, the objective situation described is understood in the propositional structure as having a causal structure, with the agent/actor, or "initial condition", in the source position of a directional source-goal order relation, and the patient or "result" in the goal position. In an "active" clause the directionality is "direct", with "agent"/subject aligned with source, and "patient"/object in the goal position (think of an arrow going from "agent" to "object"). In a passive clause the direction indicated is the inverse, with the source-goal "arrow" running from agent (non-subject) to patient (now in the grammatical subject position, and also now in the semantic goal position. The "eye" associated with the grammatical subject position is constant.
In the case at hand, in interpretation (2), the dominant clause has "students" in the source/agent position and "jobs" in the goal/object; and with the postmodifier for "jobs", "jobs" is now in the subject (and source) position, with both "degree" and "earnings" in the object/goal position. The postmodifier construction in (2) (i.e., without the repair) has shifted the "point of view" taken with regard to the situation described as "above-average earnings", from that of "students" (1) to that of "jobs" (2). And, in the view of the dominant clause, the interests of "students" are different than the interests of "jobs". That's what seems to be going on with the semantics. This kind of what seems to be editing oversight is probably common; it seems to me like a familiar need for revision to block a possible ambiguity.