'Mickey Mouse' degrees: question

[felissamy]

I genuinely don't understand the discourse around this. I know the phrase is not the Conservatives making, but anyway, can anyone help me to understand.
Degrees are labelled poor value and Mickey Mouse if they don't lead to employment.
But the degrees that are given as Mickey Mouse examples seem to be the ones that do lead directly to employment, eg Golf Studies, Tourism Studies, Sports Science. Courses that are inherited from the polytechnic model.

Is Classics or Archaeology not Mickey Mouse because it is done at 'prestigious' universities, where you could study pretty much anything and walk into a job through contacts, cultural capital etc? Or is it not Mickey Mouse because it is perceived to be rigorous, and employability as direct result is unimportant?

Or are only Law, Medicine, Accounting to be supported from now on, as these, against the original principle of the academic university, are a training in a profession. Polytechnics used to be the training version of higher ed, now universities are supposed to be, but on,y around certain professions.

I find it all confusing, And don't think anything much will happen about it, as it is a perennial. The maddening discussions on radio/online expose how little people,e know about universities, funding, loans etc.

I did a dance degree, have I used it? No, however, it did give me a lot of skills and I was able to lean on these to do other things.

That being said, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

‘Postmodernism’ isn’t a subject and I can’t think of many (any?) places where you can study it as a degree in and of itself. It’s a theoretical framework that can be applied (validly or not, depending on your position) to a huge range of subjects.

Anyway, no one is a postmodernist these days!

I’ve employed a number of candidates who had a media studies degree (when I was a newspaper editor and more recently in my PR role). They usually have work experience to support and it’s far more relevant than classical studies. I did history and politics at degree and that helped with portraying evidence and different sides of an argument.

I’m not sure what anything academic can be if it’s not a ‘subject’. And I was commenting on the vacuousness of postmodernism as a thing (to avoid the word ‘subject’), not as a degree.

Anyway, I broadly agree. The retreat of postmodernism is very welcome. But there’s still an awful lot of old nonsense stinking up a variety of degree courses.

Think media studies is now considered more seriously with the advent of social media and other media platforms.