When Worlds Collide
British taxpayers have taken a look at some of the university courses they're subsidizing (Horse Psychology is one), and they're not happy:
...[T]he Taxpayers' Alliance highlighted 401 [non-academic] courses starting this autumn in the UK, which it said cost £40m a year to run.
... [Defenders of the courses] said [they] were over-subscribed and graduates much in demand.
The TaxPayers' Alliance report said the courses "lend the respectability of scholarly qualifications to non-academic subjects."
The training they offered would be better learned on the job, it suggested.
The report had a "top five" of target courses:
Outdoor adventure with philosophy, at Marjon, the College of St Mark and St John in Plymouth
Science: fiction and culture, at the University of Glamorgan [UD doesn't quite get this one. Do they mean science fiction and culture?]
Equestrian psychology, at the Welsh College of Horticulture in Mold, Flintshire
Fashion buying, at Manchester Metropolitan University
Golf management, at UHI Millennium Institute, based in Inverness.
Author Peter Cuthbertson said: "Political priorities have led to a never-ending drive to increase the number of students in university.
"As a result, there has been a massive expansion of 'non-degrees' of little or no academic merit.
"The government has failed in its pledge to abolish 'Mickey Mouse' degrees.
"If 'non-courses' were abolished, all the other students could save over £100 on their tuition fees or buy an extra pint of beer a week."
Two worlds are in collision here, one the old-fashioned taxpayers, still operating with concepts like "academic merit" and "scholarly qualifications," and the other the new managerial administrators, who've pretty much tossed out things like philosophy and literature in their zeal to respond to market demands. ... I mean, if you ask people what they want to study, they'll say golf management or casino studies every time...
Here in the US, where taxpayers bear much less of the cost of higher education, you rarely hear a peep about this. If a private college wants to offer courses in surfing or catering, that's considered its own business. And of course America, unlike England, never had much time for intellectuality for its own sake.
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