'Mickey Mouse' university courses could have student loans removed
Programmes with high drop-out rates and low levels of graduate employment will be under scrutiny
Universities are facing a crackdown on “Mickey Mouse” degrees as the watchdog threatens to withdraw student loan funding from low-quality courses.
I'd begin with courses connected with any university professor cited by the Guardian in the past ten years. To that list, add courses with some key words in the course literature such as 'gender', 'privilege' or 'climate'. From the combined list, weed out a small number which seem to be sound and the job's done.
4 comments:
Our local "university" is really an old teacher training college which had money thrown at it; it bumps along near the bottom of the uni league tables every year. About a decade ago, it decided that courses in counselling couldn't pay their way, so decided to axe them.
The entitled screeching from the nice caring middle class ladies who were going to be made redundant was deafening. A fantastic example of entitlement culture. I don't remember the same fuss being made over engineering when their departments closed across the country.
I can remember a fuss about forty years ago when Cambridge decided to suppress a couple of lectureships in Iranian Studies. I wondered out loud whether it might not be a good idea if some British students learned Farsi. Oh no, I was told, the teaching concentrated on the dead languages of Iran.
The Hatfield polytechnic was once considered among the best such colleges in the country. Situated near the De Havilland works there was a wealth of employment opportunities and guest tutors. Then it became a university, incorporating various colleges scattered around the county. The main campus in Hatfield still led the field in engineering training. Until something happened. I had a lodger in his second year there, he told me that the uni was running a drive to recruit more female students. This was because the ratio of male to female was six to one. They did manage to get a few girls into engineering courses but needed to add social studies type courses for the girls. Problem solved, if it was a problem in the first place. Nowadays engineering is not at the core of the college. Britain longer make things but at least we have counselors to make us feel better about it.
Sam - I assume they received counselling as part of their redundancy package.
dearieme - how odd - surely Farsi would enable would-be scholars to communicate more easily with Iranian scholars about those dead languages.
Andy - it seems like an important difference between men and women, but to my mind we need engineers more than we need social studies bods. A nettle which isn't really being grasped.
Post a Comment