Last week it was reported that RIBA President Ruth Reed’s efforts to lobby government about the need to maintain and strengthen the professional training of architects were rebuffed with the remark that ‘there are too many architects anyway’. Building Design Magazine picked up the debate on this a few days ago and it has found an echo among many landscape architects wondering if there are just too many people chasing too little work.
This has prompted me once again to think through two key aspects of the question. Firstly, assuming that there might be too many landscape architects, what could we do about it? And secondly, how would we know if there really were too many?
For the past 20 years, UK universities have become steadily more market-driven. This means that when LA Law was first screened on UK television the late 80s, there was a surge of people wanting to study law. When CSI starting running, there was a huge explosion in the numbers of people who wanted to study forensic science (although the number of forensic scientist job vacancies each year in the UK could almost be counted on one hand). At the moment architects are experiencing the highest rates of unemployment in their professional history, but architecture remains a tremendously popular subject for undergraduate study. The entry grades required are high and I have heard recently of one institution that has six applicants for every place. Plainly then, people are influenced by many more factors in their choice of degree than the mere availability of jobs. The majority of people who study law do not go on to become lawyers, and the majority of people who study architecture do not go on to become architects. Young people need to have a realistic sense of what their employment chances are at the end of their studies, but after that, it is up to them.
So, if there is a demand for courses in landscape architecture, there is no mechanism to stop universities opening and filling more and more of them. What could the LI do? Well we could stop promoting landscape architecture as a career at all, hope that as many people as possible just forgot about us, and expect numbers to dwindle down as a result. As a consequence of course, we would end up over time with an undersupply of new professionals, and when we wanted to do something about that we would find that as a result of falling numbers many courses had closed, leaving us with no ready means of rebuilding numbers again.
Could we stop accrediting courses on grounds other than the quality and relevance of the content? We would be on fairly dodgy ground if we said to a university ‘Your course is great – it meets all our criteria and is turning out very good young professionals, but we’ve decided there are just too many and we are not accrediting you.’ If I was the Vice Chancellor of that university I would be dialling my lawyer’s number before the sentence was finished. And, naturally, the fact that we do not accredit a course does not mean it can’t run. If a university can fill its places on a course that is unaccredited it will do so and the result will simply be that rising numbers of people will graduate and seek work in the field of landscape architecture without ever meeting the professional standards of chartered landscape architects. Would this be a good thing?
Maybe we ought to accept that there may be a fairly loose relationship between the number of people studying a subject and the number of people who end up working in the field. If more people study landscape architecture than can find jobs that may be hard on the individual, but not much harder really than on people who study French and then can’t get jobs as French teachers, or people who study medicine and find that the NHS has no room for them. There is the argument that they will damage the opportunities for others by pulling salaries down but if they never have a chance to get their foot on the first rung of the ladder, any effect of this sort would probably be fairly limited.
So are there really too many landscape architects in the first place? At the moment we have record numbers of graduates coming out into a ferociously difficult jobs market and there is clearly a mismatch between the number of people and the number of opportunities. I for one am very glad that I am not trying to take my first career steps today, because it is extremely difficult, but it is worth remembering that as recently as 2007 there was a considerable undersupply of landscape architects. The Homes and Communities Agency undertook a UK-wide survey of skills shortages in the built environment sector and this showed that out of all the professions, the shortage of landscape architects was the most acute (actually, HCA described it as a 97 per cent shortage – i.e. that there were nearly two jobs for every applicant. I find that rather hard to believe, but even so, the general tendency was very clear). The shortage was so severe that CABE decide to use public money to rectify it and funded the LI to run the ‘I Want To Be A Landscape Architect’ campaign to start attracting more university applications. We know, anecdotally, that practices were’ poaching’ students out of university, urging them not to go back and do their diploma year but to come and work for them now because there was a job already waiting for them. All this came to a juddering halt very quickly, but at least landscape architecture went into the recession with an undersupply of people, rather than an oversupply.
However pessimistic about the future you may be, the recession can’t go on forever. Equally a whole generation will probably pass before we ever see a construction boom on the scale we witnessed in the years up to 2007 again. At some point in a year or two we will move back towards some sort of equilibrium and prospects will start to pick up. Neither the boom nor the bust are very good starting points for future projections.
My final thought is that, saying how many professionals there should be, is probably harder for landscape architecture than for almost any other profession. If you are an ear, nose and throat specialist you have a fixed quantity of ears, noses and throats to work on and the NHS usually manages to plan its future workforce with some degree of accuracy (though it sometimes goes horribly wrong). Landscape architects, however, have such a huge and varied range of expertise and are able to turn their hands to so many different things that they are in a better position than people in many other professions to adjust from one type of work to another, spreading from social housing into schoolbuilding, on into masterplanning or designing out crime, ecosystem studies or LVIA. A number of members have told me of their own personal odysseys over the past three years as they have adapted their practice to a changing and very demanding market. There is often a concern that, especially in a recession, architects or other professions move their tanks onto the lawn of landscape architecture. This does happen, but it seems to me that on the whole landscape architects are much better equipped to lead the assault the other way.
The number of chartered landscape architects stands currently at 3,321. The number has risen steadily over the years but over the last decade it has only grown at about a hundred a year and there is no real chance of it growing any faster. My sense is that if we maintain or slightly increase this number, the work will come back in time. If we try to artificially shrink the number by making it harder for people to enter the profession, the tanks of the other professions will face no contest and when the good times come back, we will find they are in permanent occupation of our turf.
My conclusion is that, despite hard times now, there are probably not too many landscape architects. If more people study landscape architecture at university and eventually end up doing other things, that is one means of establishing a greater understanding of landscape values in the world at large, and thus no bad thing.
supply and demand is a basic economic fact. if a prospective student wants to study landscape architecture he/she will weigh up the salary offered by the professions verseus the debt of length of study.
I can see the lack of prospects for undergraduates will put them off studying landscape where the jobs available are only able to offer mediocre salaries compared to other vocations after a long course of study. Let he market dictate what number can be supported its really not for the LI to decide this.