Clearly universities needed a lot more money to pay for more staff and more facilities for the huge number of additional students. Presumably the government funded this up to a point but not sufficiently according to the universities, so the top ups covered the gap. Without that money, standards would fall, irrespective of which courses the unis were offering. I think the issue of which courses should be offered at uni is different from how they should be funded, although the two, and others, are related.
Sorry, I don't know anything about degrees in football studies, who allowed them to start up or why. The 'mickey mouse' epithet isn't useful as it only expresses your disdain rather than saying anything about the course. Some people, it seems, would count them as worthwhile if they were useful for getting a job (or perhaps setting up as an agent - could be very lucrative, then they would pay lots of tax and be a major contributor to society, in that view). I don't know whether they are/were useful to people who intended to work in football. If the government thinks that too many people are doing degrees that are not worthwhile, then they should stop funding those courses. That should be fairly simple and it really has nothing to do with funding for universities in general. Maybe people who use that particular stick are doing it because it suits them? Of course, some governments have an idealogical predisposition to allowing organisations to offer whatever they want, allowing the consumer to choose, and making the funding follow the consumer, all regardless of whether any of it is useful to anyone or beneficial to the common good.
Personally, I agree that university degrees should be academic not particularly vocational - law, medicine, dentistry and vet medicine being the exceptions that spring to mind, although these courses involve a lot of practical training too.
Football Studies, How to Become a Millionaire in the Music Business or whatever, might be suitable for other FE institutions but they are fundamentally not academic and not core to what universities do. I tend to agree about turning polytechnics into universities to a large extent, but don't think it was Labour that started that, although I seem to remember there were two distinct stages so maybe Labour did the second one?
Hi Bacon,
Degrees should go back to old fashioned ways - teaching, law, science & engineering etc.
What is traditional or old-fashioned depends on where you draw the line and start your tradition. The Humanities (now called Arts) are some of the oldest courses in our universities. I agree with you as long as you include them - the main ones anyway.
If you regard a degree as valuable only to the extent that it gets you a job you might regard philosophy or history as a useless degree as it doesn't lead to any jobs. (Some would say teacher, but what's the point of teaching history at school if its a useless subject anyway?) Then you might as well do away with all Arts Faculty subjects. My boss, for example, regards Philosphy and Politics as 'Mickey Mouse subjects'. (His main interest is in making money and the main skills required in his business are a dedication to making money and numeracy.) I wonder whether David Cameron and all the other senior politicians and civil servant who did the prestigious PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) course at Oxford agree with him?
RRocks