Yorkshire Post: Degree subjects of derision - or just an educated choice?

A few years back there was a joke doing the rounds.   

"What do you say to a sociology graduate?"   

"Can I have a burger and fries, please."   

A decade ago a sociology degree was seen by many as a soft option that wasn't worth the paper it was written on.   

Now, it's equestrian psychology and golf management that are being dismissed as "Mickey Mouse" courses.   

Culture Minister Margaret Hodge coined this phrase while she was Higher Education Minister, saying students would not want to pay for worthless degrees once tuition fees were introduced.

But the controversy surrounding these supposedly soft options hasn't gone away.   

The TaxPayers' Alliance, a group campaigning for lower taxes, said in a recent report that more than 400 "non-courses" were costing the public £40m a year.

At the top of its hitlist was outdoor adventure with philosophy, at Marjon, the College of St Mark and St John in Plymouth, while others included fashion buying at Manchester Metropolitan University and golf management at UHI Millennium Institute in Inverness.

A degree was once seen as a passport to a high-flying career that came with a salary to match, showing prospective employers you had attained a certain academic standard.

But with more graduates flooding the marketplace in recent years, there are fears these standards are dropping, and the finger is being pointed at the increasing number of new courses popping up.

Jenny Ungless, director at City Life Coaching, which offers career advice to young professionals, claims the Government's target of getting 50 per cent of young people to university is one of the problems.

"There's a mindset that if you want a successful career you have to go to university, yet quite often the career a student wants doesn't require them to have a degree.

"However, there are a lot of courses which aren't traditional ones, but which equip you for the job you want to do like landscape gardening, or golf management and they are completely legitimate."

But do these kind of vocational courses warrant university degrees?   

"They're fine as long as the courses do what they say on the tin, so if you're training to be a fashion buyer you are equipped to go straight into the job," she says.

"From the point of view of employers there is concern that the quality of applicants is slipping, but this is not because more people are taking softer options but because basic maths and English standards have dropped."

Recent figures show the typical graduate is likely to rack up about £20,000 of debt and Mrs Ungless, a classics graduate from Cambridge University, rejects the idea that some courses are a waste of taxpayers' money.

"There is some cost to the taxpayer but there's a huge cost to the individuals who are planning to go to university," she says.

"Someone can go to Oxford University and study law but if they don't end up being a lawyer you can argue that's a waste of taxpayers' money.

"I think there's a lot of hypocrisy and snobbery surrounding this issue."   

Philip Parkin, general secretary of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT), believes university degrees are more important than ever.

"We are much more degree orientated now and the number of low-skilled jobs is reducing, which means that degrees are becoming essential," he says.

"There's a question whether some courses do have the academic rigour that is required and some new universities are trying to do eye-catching courses in the hope of increasing their numbers and I think filling places sometimes overrides the academic rigour.

"Do we need as many media studies graduates as we are producing? I suspect we don't."   

He would like to see university courses more closely tailored to Britain's economic needs.   

"New courses need to be developed all the time in areas like electronic communications.   

"But they need to have the required academic rigour and if they don't have that they should be HNDs, because you have to retain the value of having a degree."

There are those who believe a degree from anywhere other than Oxbridge or one of the Russell Group universities is somehow inferior. But they are missing the point. More than 60 per cent of graduate jobs advertised don't require a degree in any particular discipline. Britain's economic needs are changing all the time and it can be said that universities are simply reacting to demand and one person's "Mickey Mouse" course is another person's specialist degree.

Take James Rodgers who studied Computer Animation and Special Effects at Bradford University last year.   

The 21 year-old Rotherham graduate won the Royal Television Society award for the best student animation in Yorkshire and went on to get a job working at Red Star Studios in Sheffield.

Perhaps those who dismiss new-fangled "Mickey Mouse" courses might want to consider that Mickey Mouse was created 80 years ago and is still one of the most recognisable symbols in the world.