@lanadelgrey
What pisses me off is that while people get sucked into doing what appear to be the interesting up to date courses that appear relevant to contemporary life, the people who get to rule us and/or make money and make the rules are doing the trad subjects - Johnson classics, Phillips English etc. Ok they also got the silver spoon of private school then Oxbridge as did huge number of MPs, journalists, barristers etc but as I point out to the DCs doing trad subjects for a start or v vocational subjects means you can do go down a more niche route later or via a module or two. It’s not fair but it’a a real con to encourage impressionable teens to spend their chance at uni on some of these courses. If you want to beat the f*kers you have to fight on roughly similar grounds.
I don't think "studies" courses in general should be done at the undergraduate level, even if they are completely legit. In fact I think to some extent that's what led to some of the problems we see now. You have a bunch of kids out of high school with no serious background in, say, biology, or how history is studied, or political science, or anthropology. And they go into women's studies and are reading all kinds of things which draw on those without the methodological background to really scrutinise or understand them. And their knowledge is too focused so it's not easy to put what they are learning in context. Just a shallow example - I was talking to a student once about historic minority voting rights, about which she had strong opinions, but it became clear quickly that this person had no real idea about the development of voting rights generally or how long anyone had been voting, and what she did know seemed to be based on an American context.
These kinds of studies programs could be really powerful at the graduate level but poor undergrauate training has compromised many of them.