THE 19-year-old has arrived home from university for the Easter holidays. “This lecturers’ strike has worked out brilliantly for us,” he announced.

“They’ve reduced the content of our exams to account for the fact we haven’t been able to cover everything on the course, so there’s not as much work to do.”

I’m not disputing the lecturers’ right to take industrial action. But he’s paying £9,000 for his course this year. And he thinks that’s good.

I don’t know what they’re teaching him in economics, which is one third of his course, but I assume he hasn’t touched on cost-benefit analysis yet.

Maybe the lecturers have been on strike when they should have been doing those modules.

As it is, when the university is fully operational, he’s only got 11 hours contact time a week.

Off for nearly four weeks now over Easter, with no more teaching before the end of term, he finishes once his diminished exams are over on May 22. Then he’s on holiday until September 25

“As long as I get a degree at the end of it, that’s what counts,” he says.

Perhaps this wasn’t the time to point out to him that, according to our new education secretary, many arts and social science degrees do little to boost students’ careers and offer less value to society than the Stem subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths.

According to government ministers, Roscoe’s £27,000 politics, philosophy and economics degree may well turn out to be utterly useless, while he’s in danger of entering the job market as little more than a worthless generalist. Which is why they’re now considering cutting fees for non-Stem courses.

So have my husband and I, who have failed to breed one scientist out of the five sons we’ve raised, made a big mistake by encouraging all our boys to study the subjects they love?

Certainly, it’s tougher for new graduates now. Back in 1980, when we embarked on our degrees, only about 70,000 people went to university each year. Now it’s more like 500,000 and any old degree doesn’t quite cut it in the same way.

Yet most of those government ministers who are pouring scorn on the arts and humanities today were once students of these ‘rubbish’ degrees themselves.

There are amazing opportunities for science students now. But I can’t help thinking, in our fast-moving and increasingly dehumanised world of artificial intelligence and coding, with so many technical and engineering functions giving way to automation, the Government is being a little short-sighted.

For the sort of human creativity and communication skills which are nurtured on arts and humanities courses could soon emerge as more important than ever.

Roscoe’s older brothers, despite their degrees in apparently low-value subjects such as history, English literature and philosophy, have, thankfully, got jobs, some of which didn’t exist when I was at school, and all of which they seem to enjoy.

So Roscoe is assuming everything will be all right. He’s certainly finding plenty to do in all the free time he now has, visiting friends who are at university in Edinburgh this week, then another who is studying in Rotterdam the next.

Which at least, I suppose, is an education in itself.

A FRIEND arrived at work to discover three text messages from her 16-year-old son, which he’d sent during her 30-minute drive from home. The first read: “I’ve forgotten my physics book, can you bring it into school now?” The next, which came over ten minutes later, said: “Where are you?” Then, ten minutes after that, he sent a third: “It’s OK, I’ve found it.”

ANOTHER friend, who has always made her own, delicious fresh bread for the family every day, was horrified to hear about the sliced white her son is eating now he is at university. It’s not so much the fact that it costs only 29 pence from Aldi. “He says it’s great because one loaf lasts the whole term,” she says.