'Mickey Mouse' Degrees

Ed Caesar wrote an article for the Sunday Times Magazine a couple of months ago entitled ‘Nice Little Learners’. In it he posed the question – which subject will get you the best job? A: English Literature or B: Golf Studies. As this blog has already suggested the conventionality of our current education system would lead students to English Literature every time, dismissing the latter as a ‘mickey mouse’ degree. Nevertheless, Caesar goes on to document the careers of some of the recipients of these so called ‘mickey mouse’ degrees.

Lucinda Davies, a 24 year old who graduated with a 2:1 in Golf Management Studies from the University of Birmingham, was poached by a resort in Egypt before she had even completed her studies. She is now back in England working as a coach and club pro. However, her ambitions stretch further. One day she would love to run the PGA tour.

Mhairi Mc Donald graduated from Heriot-Watt University in Edingburgh in 2007 with a first-class Msc in Brewing and Distilling. Not only is every person in her year employed but she has her “dream job” in brand development for Glenglassaugh Distillery in Aberdeenshire. Others qualify from courses such as; Stained-glass Studies, Surfing Studies and Computer-games Programming. Many arrive at college with three As at A-level. Proving that these graduates are not only academically intelligent, but are creatively intelligent too.

In a time when 40,000 young people graduating this year will be out of work students need to think more creatively about what kind of returns they are going to get from their qualifications.

Academic Inflation

 

Who is our current education system for? Who succeeds at it? If we were honest in answering these questions we'd have to admit that the purpose of the current education system is to produce university professors. Is this the pinnacle of all human achievement? Surely it's just a form of life. Ken Robinson tell us that the current education system came into being to meet the needs of industrialism and that the hierarchy of subjects is based on two ideas;

1. The most useful subjects for work are at the top. People are steered away from things at school; things that they like because "You would never get a job doing that!"

2. Academic ability, because universities designed the system in their image.

The consequences are that many highly intelligent, brilliant, creative people think they're not. We have to try to change this. According to UNESCO in the next thirty years more people will be graduating through education than ever before. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Twenty years ago if you had a degree you had a job. But now many people with degrees are unemployed because a job that used to require a BA now requires an MA and so on. This process of academic inflation is indicative of the fact that the whole process of education is shifting beneath our feet. In my view we need to rethink our idea of intelligence.

Intelligence is diverse!

Intelligence is diverse. We think about the world how we experience it; visually, sounds, kinesthetic, abstract terms and movement. Intelligence is also dynamic. Creativity, which is the process of having original thoughts and ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeings things. We have to rethink the way we're educating our children to attend to their individual intelligences