To coincide with the A-level results this summer, the Taxpayers’ Alliance (a tax-reduction pressure group) published a report by Peter Cuthbertson on 401 higher education degrees which he described as ‘non-courses’. This rag-bag of a list, while it managed to highlight some quite exotic combinations in its ‘top’ five
- 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
- 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.
had surprisingly little impact.
While a Surf Management degree at Swansea Institute of Higher Education was abandoned in July 2007 because the institute’s principal David Warner said ‘it was impossible to stop people poking fun at it’ – this particular degree is not listed in the report. (Surely, had its author noticed, the cancellation would have been mentioned as a sign of the times moving his way?)
Thankfully few hospitality or related courses figured; those that were mentioned arrived through ignorance or inconsistency on the part of the researchers (young fogeys doing a holiday job)? Some mentions were simply odd: Baking Technology Management at London South Bank University is a reputable professional degree, and one of the few left in the UK. Fourteen hospitality management degrees were mentioned (inexplicably including well-established centres of excellence like University of Wales Cardiff, Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Met), overlooking the other 100 or so that are available
Apart from negativity about the equine (94 courses mentioned), adventure (36), complementary medicine (33) and outdoor-related courses (25), the report’s real objection was to FE colleges like Birmingham College of Food, Travel and Creative Studies or New College Nottingham offering any degrees. Ironically FE colleges’ degrees are externally moderated, so probably more heavily inspected than much more traditional provision. Old-fashioned educational snobbery underpins this judgment, with the University of Derby unfairly singled out.
On what criteria?
The selection criteria used in the report are subjective and circular. The authors say:
In determining what courses qualify, we asked the following questions in all cases:
Does the course require scholarship in areas that could reasonably be defined as academic?
If the course imparts practical skills only, is there a good reason it should be learned in an academic environment, rather than on the job or as part of genuine vocational training?
Prof Alan Smithers is quoted and sheds more light on the principles of selection:
…I was privileged to be able to take the subject of my choice to its limits at university. If, as a first-generation student, I had been tempted by the publicity on to some sexy-sounding but vacuous course, I would have been cheated.
As the report demonstrates the vacuity of a ‘vacuous course ’is a personal judgment. If the opposites of vacuity are: ‘traditional bodies of knowledge’, ‘learning that demands serious scholarship’ and ‘intellectual stimulation’ many vocational degrees, however strategic, would be in difficulties. Not that they lack intellectual challenge or stimulus; as the case of hospitality illustrates, complex subject matter is quite as hard to teach or study as a more conventional cut-and-dried discipline with which a former research scientist like Alan Smithers might feel more comfortable.
Opponents of the popular policy of ‘comprehensive’ higher education are obliged to nibble at its edges, to suggest that some courses might be better delivered by on-the-job training or work experience. The Spartans, like Corelli Barnett, John Redwood (and a distinct party in the senior reaches of the hospitality industry) have to suggest that harder-sounding and more strategic subjects like engineering, chemistry and computer sciences would contribute more to the economy.[1]
The report doesn’t help its own case. You might expect the author of:
increasing numbers of A-level students are committing themselves at the age of 17 to spending thousands of pounds and three years of their life studying a subject that may raise their expectations of employment while leaving them no more employable than when they started.
to think for one moment about the relative employment prospects of today's UK physics or chemistry degree as against, for example a hospitality (or even equine or adventure management) qualification. Nor have they engaged the Stalinist overtones of this argument with their enthusiasm for personal freedom and the free market.
One man's Mickey Mouse course is another
man’s literae humaniores
Vocational degrees are now accepted as good for student-career opportunities, beneficial for the real economy and offering worthwhile intellectual challenge. When current London mayoral candidate Boris Johnson was briefly Conservative higher education spokesman, he showed how far the centre ground has moved on higher education. Interviewed by BBC News in January 2006, he made several sensible points
‘…higher education adds immeasurably to the value of the UK economy without necessarily obliging everybody to pursue courses that have some immediate vocational application. Sometimes in our thinking about higher education, we’re too narrowly confined to a utilitarian calculus about what it's doing to the bottom line of UK plc.’
And Mr Johnson spoke up for vocational degrees, arguing
‘one man's Mickey Mouse course is another man’s literae humaniores.’[2]
The good news
The positive fallout from this flurry is that the vocational degree appears to have come of age. If there is to be sniping at vocational degrees, other more recently arrived disciplines catch the flak.
Hospitality higher education has grown out of any embarrassment suffered from Laurie Taylor’s merciless sniping in his THES column in the 1970s and 80s. British students and parents know that a ‘vocationally relevant’ degree in a fast-growing industry like hospitality is a good bet in the current UK economy. And whatever the Taxpayers’ Alliance or the CBI say, they have no difficulty about making a free choice of a course that suits their ambitions and aptitudes.
References
- ‘Last week, an official study found that fewer than one in three postgraduates studying “strategic” subjects in the UK are actually British. No less than 71 percent of those pursuing advanced degrees in British universities – in areas like engineering, chemistry and computer sciences – are from overseas. …In an ever more competitive world, post-industrial nations like ours need desperately to move up the value chain.’Liam Halligan ‘Unequal exchanges of knowledge’ Sunday Telegraph 16 September 2007
- This is the Latin name of the four-year Oxford University course of classical languages and philosophy, once the training ground of Britain’s top civil servants, also known as ‘greats’; for the full report [24 January 2006] go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4642806.stm
