Category: mickey mouse courses

  • So you’ve been accused of harbouring “Mickey Mouse” courses at your institution…now what?

    So you’ve been accused of harbouring “Mickey Mouse” courses at your institution…now what?

    Margaret Hodge’s 2003 speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research on “achieving excellence and equality in post-16 education” tells us that even under New Labour policy announcements on higher education were “long-awaited.”

    The speech illustrates how then, as now, the government was grappling with questions of growing and massifying participation while retaining the sector’s global competitiveness; promoting specialisation and collaboration; boosting quality and civic engagement.

    Hodge had taken to the stage to explain the government’s plans for driving up HE participation to at least 50 per cent of young people and signal the themes of its forthcoming higher education strategy – but warned that doing so via “stacking up numbers on Mickey Mouse courses” was “not acceptable.”

    Hodge’s usage shows that she – or her speechwriter – assumed that the meaning of the term “Mickey Mouse course” was widely understood. But as DK has explored elsewhere on the site, Mickey Mouse’s meanings when applied to higher education have shifted and evolved according to cultural context.

    What has remained consistent, however, is the assumption that there is a chunk of HE provision that all right-thinking people can see obviously shouldn’t “count” as HE – because it’s unserious, or too popular, or on a topic that’s not traditionally been seen as academic or, in the recent analysis from the Taxpayer’s Alliance, ideologically suspect.

    Let’s imagine you’re a university press officer looking at a message on your phone or a note in your email inbox requesting that you explain succinctly by 3pm today why it’s entirely sane and reasonable to offer courses in e-gaming, fashion, filmmaking, tourism, mental health, gender identity, outdoor learning, climate change, sports or any one of a long tail of stuff the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus wouldn’t see the point of. What’s your strategy?

    Make it go away

    Back in 2003, the BBC reports that Margaret Hodge swiftly felt the sharp end of university leaders’ tongues, who apparently said her remarks were “offensive” and “ill-informed.” It’s hard to imagine a government minister getting such short shrift from the sector today – while some of the issues might look similar, the political landscape has changed enormously.

    Even so, Option One, the dismissive approach, is seductive. There are several flavours of dismissive available: you could point out that higher education institutions hold their own degree awarding powers, are responsible for their own quality and academic standards, and curriculum, and that ergo, any course provided by a legitimate HE provider is de facto itself legitimate. Or you could question the motives of the questioner and suggest that the framing is a political act designed to discredit universities and higher education by those who wish the sector ill. The moral high ground feels pretty good, and has the advantage of refusing to concede the principle of the question, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to public understanding of contemporary higher education.

    A whole bunch of institutions approached for comment simply did not respond – possibly because they were asked to do so during the Christmas break but it may also have been because they refused to dignify the question with a response, an approach that might be characterised as Option One (b).

    De-escalate

    The institutions who chose to respond to the Telegraph when confronted with the evidence amassed by the Taxpayers’ Alliance seem to have in the main gone for Option Two: explain and clarify – and try to wedge in a plug for the institution.

    Thus the University of Cumbria’s spokesperson explains that its MA in outdoor experiential learning is “designed for those passionate about transforming education, inspiring sustainability, and reshaping how we engage with experience in learning” – and notes that the university is in the top ten for graduate destinations. The University of Nottingham’s spokesperson points out that its workplace health and wellbeing course is postgraduate level, and therefore not taxpayer funded – and says the course encourages “a rigorous scientific approach that fulfils and exceeds legal requirements to support organisational performance and effectiveness and enhance worker productivity.”

    There are absolutely merits to this approach – essentially it smothers the reputational fire with approved corporate narratives. When the Telegraph comes to call during the Christmas break you probably don’t lob your scanty communications resources at anything other than de-escalation. This, arguably, is not the moment to start a media scrap and find yourself inadvertently the “face” of the Mickey Mouse debate. Experience shows that that sort of thing can haunt your institution for ages and goodness knows everyone’s got enough to worry about without that.

    Engage in the debate

    But we should give at least a decent bit of consideration to Option 3: full-throated defence offered in language that people recognise as meaningful. That means more or less grudgingly accepting the premise that it’s hard for everyone to see why some lucky, lucky students get to study something as fun and creative and glamorous as fashion or “the outdoors” or identity or filmmaking. It involves painting a succinct picture of what these subjects achieve for students, and industries, not in big picture stats but in human terms, in stories.

    I have two children, one in a state primary which, like many, have invested in a forest school. When my son was in reception he got to learn outdoors once a week; since then it’s been once a term at most. I can’t believe I’m the only parent of an active kid that is troubled by how little time the system affords kids to learn in and about nature.

    Or, not to make this all about my kids, but being a parent computer games are a pretty big feature of my life. I can see how gaming can offer opportunities for my kids to problem solve and develop tactical and situational awareness, but I want to be sure they are safe when they do that – thanks, e-games courses.

    Or, I’m a middle aged woman who sometimes struggles to find clothes that feel right for my professional and personal identity. Or I’m someone who wants to understand why the gender identity “debate” has become so toxic and what my orientation to it should be. Or I’m worried that my efforts to put my rubbish in the right bins isn’t going to deliver on that net zero target and is that even a useful target anyway?

    OK, my preoccupations are very obviously filtered through the lens of middle-class London liberal. I’m not suggesting I’m a typical Telegraph reader – but I’m using my own sense of what the existence of these courses might mean for me to illustrate the point that lots of them touch people’s everyday concerns in ways that could be surfaced more powerfully.

    The “Mickey Mouse” accusation runs deeper than notions of social irrelevance, however – inherent in the proposition that something is “Mickey Mouse” is calling into question whether these are subjects and courses that deserve to be part of the thing we call higher education. And that’s a much harder challenge to defend because doing so may feel like to do so requires a referral back to expertise, or knowledge that is inaccessible to the common reader and therefore will struggle to “cut through” in any media response.

    Outside the realm of quality and standards regulation the question of why something is a legitimate source of higher education study speaks to the range of conceptions of higher education value. Is it worthwhile because there is labour market demand for it, because it is sufficiently complex to constitute a structured body of knowledge that merits deep intellectual engagement, because the resourcing required to study it is only accessible in higher education contexts, because of its wider social relevance or some thrilling combination of all these? And how on earth do you capture all that in a media quote?

    I’ve been puzzling over this all week, and have come to the conclusion that there can’t be a silver bullet on how to defend the HE-ness of any given course, especially when the framing of the scepticism is so multi-faceted. One person’s useful market labour skills is another person’s intellectual lack of rigour. There’s no easy “win” available for this argument – but there might be a position to take that feels authentic and worthwhile that is rooted in the course’s own conception of itself and its meaning and value set within the wider institutional framework of mission and purpose.

    Latent to salient

    It’s not, I think, that institutions and their staff have no sense of why their courses are meaningful as higher education, but that this knowledge is so deeply embedded in the structures and cultures of the institution as to be almost entirely latent and unarticulated. Yet to be able to capture any of this pithily and in the teeth of a sceptical line of questioning that knowledge needs to be explicit and intentionally surfaced.

    Any institution will have a stock of anecdotes, insight and ideas about why their courses matter, in human terms. This knowledge isn’t always held in comms teams, who are not always linked closely with the nuts and bolts of the academic endeavour . It’s not an easy ask, but I’d argue that it’s worth comms teams spending some real time in some of the university’s less “mainstream” course offerings, putting forward the sorts of the challenges around value that a hostile media outlet or think tank might present and understanding the nuances of the answers before working them into something media-friendly. Don’t just talk to the programme leaders, ask to audit the classes. Direct experience trumps course marketing brochure every time.

    Because when it comes to that unexpected phone call or email asking for the justification for these woke, un-rigorous, pointless degrees, and deciding how best to respond, it’s great to at least have the option to explain why these courses are not merely legitimate higher education provision, they are essential for the furtherance of human flourishing.

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  • Identifying “mickey mouse” courses | Wonkhe

    Identifying “mickey mouse” courses | Wonkhe

    St Valentine’s Day, 1966. Salem, Oregon.

    State legislator Morris Crothers (Salem-R), a qualified doctor, is unhappy with a Bachelor’s degree in Medical Technology offered by the Oregon Technical Institute (OTI, formerly Oregon Polytechnic).

    The Capital Journal reported his words:

    a mickey mouse degree that would not allow those earning it to practice in most Oregon laboratories.

    His issue isn’t with the content of the degree, but with his perception that it does not qualify a graduate to perform certain licensed tests (including the pre-marriage test for syphilis) in the state of Oregon. I say perception because it turned out he was wrong and the course was accredited – 131 graduates were already employed by the state. His real issue was that OTI wasn’t a proper four-year college, and had low entry requirements.

    OTI chancellor RE Lieuallen responded (as recorded in The Oregonian): “Here we get into the question of the liberal arts background … some people would say that a job-oriented programme is better”.

    Crothers withdrew his accusation, claiming “the news media quoted me a little out of context”.

    This is the earliest published newspaper use of the pejorative term “mickey mouse degree”. And it betrayed a lack of understanding, and a certain level of snobbery, rather than academic failings.

    From Morris to Maurice

    In the academic literature a letter to journal American Speech from Michigan State University’s Maurice Crane slightly predates Salem’s tawdry tale: in 1958 (volume 33, number 3) his letter (“Vox Bop”) offers a partial lexicon of historic midwestern jazz slang, in which he observes:

    Incidentally, a mickey or Mickey Mouse band is not merely a ‘pop tune’ band … but the kind of pop band that sounds as if it is playing background for an animated cartoon. […] This term, which has been around almost as long as Mickey Mouse himself, has also come into common parlance in another sense at Michigan State, where a ‘Mickey Mouse course’ means a snap course, or what Princeton undergraduates in my day called a gut course

    It’s unhelpful to have slang defined by reference to earlier slang, but Collins dictionary tells us a snap course was “an academic course that can be passed with a minimum of effort”.

    For things dismissed as “hobby courses” – usually arts, crafts, and leisure pursuits – there is a suspicion that such provision lacks academic rigour. The economic value argument is less pronounced here – the sheer size of the Disney industry is just one example of just how much money and time human beings devote to hobbies and interests.

    The jazzman’s derivation is interesting in that jazz is itself based on “pop tunes” – the distinction Crane draws is around the manner of playing rather than the repertoire itself. Whether you play them with a “hip” jazz inflection or a “square” pop sensibility these are difficult tunes that are challenging to play and perform well.

    Morris dancing

    The first UK press sighting of the term was in 1972 – the Nottingham Guardian Journal published a letter from an irate Loughborough resident concerning governance problems at the Institute of Race Relations (a “so-earnest group of sociologists, permissives, and mickey mouse degree holders all speaking at the same time.”)

    Here the mouse is used to infer suspicions about the political project underpinning a degree course – in the same way that the likes of the Taxpayers Alliance is able to classify courses on topics as complex and crucial as climate science and mental health as being “mickey mouse.”

    Although Margaret Hodge famously used the term in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on 13 January 2003 she did not coin the phrase. Her perhaps ill-chosen words masked the actual intent of her speech – she was attempting to encourage the growth of two-year foundation degree provision in subjects that met the needs of local industry. This is a diametrically opposite position to the one taken by Morris Crothers – which serves to illustrate why the idea has become so useful. A “mickey mouse degree” is simply a term for higher education provision that the speaker doesn’t like.

    Many of the early media examples on this side of the Atlantic are actually playful subversions of the trope (University of Exeter drama lecturer Robin Allan received “Britain’s first PhD on Walt Disney” in 1994 – the Torquay Herald Express tells us that Mickey himself turned up on graduation day!) suggesting that the term had currency long before the term was introduced to the parliamentary record. That wasn’t Margaret Hodge either – Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes used the phrase to defend the University of Westminster from that attack in the media, in a debate on the private City of Westminster Bill in June 1995.

    You’re so fine you blow my mind

    So to describe a course as “mickey mouse” is to make a judgement that it is either academically frivolous, politically suspect, or economically worthless: and – importantly – popular. A drawing of an anthropomorphic rodent is worthless, while Mickey Mouse himself is worth billions of dollars to the Disney corporation: to use the term is to ignore a widely perceived value in favour of your own judgement.

    For this reason, a list of “mickey mouse courses” – such as the one published by the Telegraph on 3 January is the purest expression of the long running “low quality courses” debate. It floats free of metrics and data simply to reinforce prejudices.

    The 787 courses identified by a researcher (Callum McGoldrick) at the Taxpayers’ Alliance were selected based on his own judgement and assigned to one of five categories:

    • Fashion (including textiles and jewellery)
    • Games (by which I mean computer games industry related courses)
    • Media (film, photography, and – with apologies to Maurice Crane – both jazz and popular music)
    • Woke (inevitably – mostly things to do with ethnicity, gender, mental wellbeing, and sustainability)
    • Misc (which includes specifically leisure-linked vocational courses, and more general arts and crafts provision)

    There’s no distinction drawn between undergraduate, postgraduate, and non-credit-bearing provision, and (as the article illustrates) not all of the courses described are currently recruiting or funded via student loans. Courses were drawn from a series of freedom of information requests – so the list, as well as being arbitrary, is not exhaustive. It covers just 51 providers.

    It feels like a horribly labour intensive way of getting an article into the Telegraph, and as a service to contrarian think-tanks everywhere I’ve built a little tool to optimise the process. Just type a word that makes you angry into the box on the left and you get both a count and a complete list of currently recruiting undergraduate courses with that word in their title to give you that special tingly feeling.

    [Full screen]

    The bigger question

    In a 2003 article for the Guardian, Emma Brockes examined the “mickey mouse” course industry in the light of Margaret Hodge’s comments noting that “every generation has its Mickey Mouse degrees – arts subjects were mocked in the 60s and 70s, sociology in the 80s and gender studies in the 1990s.” She noted:

    “There are degrees made ludicrous by virtue of their specificity (a BA (Hons) in air-conditioning). There are degrees ridiculed for their non-specificity (citizenship studies, which, to its detractors, is so broad that it might as well be called “shit that happens in the world” studies). There are the apparent oxymorons – turfgrass science, amenity horticulture, surf and beach management and the BSc from Luton University in decision-making, which begs the cheap but irresistible observation, how did those on the course manage to make the decision to take it in the first place?

    She hangs her piece on an interview with the news editor of the Coalville and Ashby Times – one Paul Marston, a recent media studies graduate from De Montfort University. Though he does mount a defence (which Brockes rather snootily describes as half-hearted) of the relevance and interest of his degree, he laments that:

    I’m finding it difficult to move on in my career now, and I do put that down partly to my degree. It was very general, very broad, good for keeping my options open, but it doesn’t seem to have prepared me for anything much else.

    The early 00s were perhaps not the most auspicious point to begin a career in local journalism, but linkedin does confirm that Marston has had a successful career in media and communications – currently leading internal communications for defence company MBDA. It’s not clear his media studies degree directly prepared him for that role, but it feels reasonable to suggest it may have had an impact, in the same way that niche, broad, and oxymoronic courses help graduates into careers all the time.

    The “mickey mouse” accusations seldom have much to do with actual concerns about course quality. You’ll look in vain for any sign of the kind of courses that OfS and DfE are currently concerned about (franchise delivery, business studies), and the only time you see a link to metrics is with graduate salaries (which, I would argue, says more about low pay in certain industries than any failings of the courses themselves).

    It is easy and unsatisfying to critique the methodology, because (as with everything like this) the methodology isn’t the point. The prejudice, and the way people respond to it, is a much bigger issue.

    On the recent Taxpayers’ Alliance efforts, researcher Callum McGoldrick told the Telegraph:

    Taxpayers are sick of seeing their hard-earned cash subsidise rip-off degrees that offer little to no return on investment. These Mickey Mouse subjects are essentially a state-sponsored vanity project where universities fill their coffers while the public picks up the tab for loans which will never come close to being fully repaid. We need to stop funding hobby courses and start prioritising rigorous subjects that actually boost the economy and deliver value for money

    As much as the current fashion for skills planning (at levels from the local to the global) and vocational training speaks to the anxieties of a government and nation increasingly unsure of itself in a radically changing world, there’s also a sense in which it is a kind of play-acting. Sometimes we don’t think the skills we need are skills at all: while manufacturing in the UK is healthier than popularly imagined we obsess over ensuring we have the skills we need to to do that, and there is far less attention devoted to the myriad professions that keep our theatres and venues delighting audiences. We clearly need both, for our economy to thrive.

    In 1960s Salem, Morris Crothers was concerned about prestige and employer value – but his perspective was at odds with that of actual employers. Mickey Mouse, as a cipher for the immense value embedded in things we dismiss or fail to understand, betrayed his anxiety that an old order was disrupted and a new one was being born.

    Whatever the next ten years look like, in the sector or the wider economy, our starting point has to be that what will be economically (or humanly) valuable – and what skills are needed to make that value work – are at best unclear. The state may have a legitimate interest in the overall mix of subjects provided: it may have an interest as a purchaser where particular skills or expertise will be needed.

    But we also need to admit as a society that we don’t know what we will need, and that learning for the sake of learning has a value that is a little bit harder to measure.

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