5 Comments

1. Eveningsun says:

   January 28, 2011 at 2:36 pm

   “…the unique MA in Beatles, Popular Music and Society…”

   I could understand a program in “Popular Music and Society,” but “Beatles, Popular Music and Society” seems more than a bit much. Partly it’s the specificity, but beyond that there’s the provincialism, like it’s more about Liverpool than about the Beatles.

   An MA in the Stones, on the other hand….
2. AYY says:

   January 28, 2011 at 11:55 pm

   Imagine? How about The Fool on the Hill?
3. david foster says:

   January 29, 2011 at 6:46 am

   It strikes me that the vogue for degrees and certificates in very narrow fields–whether Beatles Studies or “Green Jobs”–may be mainly about marketing. Programs with names like these may snare individuals who wouldn’t be caught by a net labeled “Popular Culture, 1900-2000″ or “Advanced Welding,” even though the Beatles would surely be covered in any such popular culture class, and welding for a solar plant isn’t really all that different from welding for a coal-fired plant…
4. Eveningsun says:

   January 29, 2011 at 11:27 am

   Absolutely it’s about marketing. I suppose this sort of thing was inevitable once we were told to run higher ed like a business. Of course, the idea of turning to the market model was to help higher ed provide quality education more efficiently, not for colleges to sell as little actual value for as much money as they can get away with. The idea wasn’t to turn higher ed into THAT kind of business… Anyway, more and more it’s all about recruitment and enrollment–about selling–not about quality. Why would anyone expect otherwise? No sane business is going to tell its customers, “We know you want the cheaper, crappier model instead, but we’re not going to offer it. We’re only going to sell the higher-quality model, the one without the great football team and glitzy recreation center and easy courses and party atmosphere. If you don’t want the lean-and-mean basics we’re selling, go elsewhere.” Very few colleges could survive that way.

   Are there any effective checks on the business model’s downward pressure on quality? Well, kind of: 1.) The customers will, perhaps, insist on the best possible quality. 2.) The government will doubtless continue to insist on some minimal level of quality as a condition for subsidies and financial aid. These two checks might or might not work all that well. 1.) relies a great deal on the discernment of 18-year-olds. Sure, parents are often involved as well, and their judgment might be better than that of their children, but then again, how many parents take their children to McDonalds, because that’s just where the kids want to go, and anyway it’s inexpensive? And 2.) is implemented largely through accreditation agencies that seem less and less concerned about quality itself than about whether colleges adopt the kind of assessment structures that supposedly guarantee quality.

   Accreditation is going meta. Maybe my history is flawed, but it seems to me that once upon a time, the accreditors came to your campus to make sure the president wasn’t embezzling and to gauge whether you were offering quality courses, and that was about it. Now, the college itself is supposed to do the work of assessing its own educational quality, while the accreditors assess the quality of the assessment. I see all kinds of mischief flowing from this shift.
5. cb says:

   February 1, 2011 at 2:22 pm

   Makes me want to hold her hand.