For several years now there has been debate about the value of what Margaret Hodge (former HE minister) named Mickey Mouse degrees. In the midst of successive governments’ pushes for more vocational qualifications and a decline in applications for many traditional science-based courses, universities began to come up with new programmes. Brewing was perhaps the most notorious, but the University of Plymouth’s Surfing degree also attracted its share of sniggers.
Today, the BBC are reporting that:
Hobbies such as surfing are being turned into “Mickey Mouse” degree courses, a teachers’ union conference is to be told.
Their concern is understandable, but the statements sound increasingly reactionary in light of the developing jobs market, changes in university funding and pressures on universities. Plymouth’s programme is actually a BSc in ‘Surf Science and Technology’, with fairly standard entrance requirements for a degree at its level (200 A/AS level points). It combines modules in: mathematics, ocean science, material technology, environmental studies and event and business management. An eclectic mix, but also a compelling one that should give graduates a grounding in a range of compatible, transferable skills.
The issue is, of course, the name. Obviously ‘surfing’ will have a particular draw to hobbyists and doesn’t bear the academic clout of ‘physics’, ‘chemistry’ and their ilk. But academic clout is a malleable construct. In an increasingly competitive higher education system, one that’s being opened up to market forces in ways unimagined a generation ago, it can’t be surprising that the shape and nomenclature of degree programmes will change along with their funding mechanisms and other external pressures.
It is good and proper that the content and standards of degree programmes should be kept under scrutiny, but unless government funding policies change significantly it’s not fair to be too critical of the ways degrees are named.