While I have your attention: Interview with University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) principal, Professor Todd Walker certainly created widespread ripples when he spoke of ditching 'vanity courses'
Charles Bannerman considers the relative worth of university courses.
This newspaper’s interview with University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) principal, Professor Todd Walker certainly created widespread ripples when he spoke of ditching “vanity courses", writes Charles Bannerman.
Indeed, the professor quickly felt obliged to apologise, but I’m not clear exactly for what, because he didn’t seem to specify which courses he meant. He just spoke about no direct bearing on employment.
So if he meant subjects like UHI’s current archaeology and literature, philosophy or politics degrees, then if told there aren’t many direct jobs going in those fields, I’d believe that.
But not all genuine academic study needs to be linked directly to employment. Good degree courses do much more than train students for specific jobs. They develop generic skills like critical thinking, analytical processes, evaluation and logic, with universal applications.
Areas from civil service to industry employ graduates with degrees not directly related to their jobs, but whose academic training is a major asset.
If the professor is trying to clear out surplus capacity, then I believe that he needs a different target, and there’s plenty surplus capacity to be cleared out in a university sector that’s grown massively in recent decades.
Expansion has had at least two questionable effects. There’s a Parkinson’s Law where courses expand to fit the numbers now reaching severely dumbed down entry requirements. And as places become available to candidates further and further down the ability range, you have to wonder how much of this really amounts to what can credibly be called university degrees?
I once heard these truish words spoken in jest: “I walked past my old primary school today... it’s a university now of course.”
It’s strange how universities, including UHI, pour out people with degrees in stuff like adventure tourism management, contemporary film making in the Highlands and Islands, equine business management and.... professional golf!
Are these not what technical colleges are for? Why is the Scottish Government heavily subsidising and often paying fees for content like this to be studied expensively at university level? It’s a serious case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
If Prof Walker wants to rationalise, then he should axe pseudo-academic stuff like this, and not academically credible courses which develop vital and high-level generic intellectual skills. Meanwhile, Highland students don’t seem to be able to study the staple of maths without leaving home.
Rationalisation is certainly needed in the bloated university sector. They are taking in far too many students who then emerge with qualifications seriously lacking in credibility.
Then we have the entry qualifications. Three C passes at Higher – sometimes less – will get you into most UHI courses. I’m sorry, but after years of observing the desperate dumbing down of Scottish school qualifications from inside a classroom, I just can’t accept three Cs as really cutting it in terms of academic credibility.
But it’s not only in schools, where the former rarity of “straight As” has become almost commonplace, that awards have been seriouly diluted. For instance a university First used to be a rare distinction but these top degrees have now become 10 a penny.
The entire education sector needs a good look
at itself and what it gives out.
Meanwhile universities need to cut their cloth, regain some credibility for their degrees and leave their more academically dubious, but vocationally useful courses as technical college diplomas.
Charles Bannerman is a former science teacher and BBC sports correspondent, as well as an author and athletics coach in Inverness. This column will be fortnightly.
