Beware of shonky degree programs which promise qualifications that could be worthless. This was Education Minister Dean Wells' sensible caution to Queensland school leavers last month.
My only reservation is that the minister did not cast the net widely enough. He was warning about private organisations which offer illegal or unaccredited programs to take advantage of the burgeoning -- and unhealthy -- pressures on young people to obtain tertiary qualifications, no matter what kind of future employment they may seek.
But although they may be legal, a number of universities offer courses which seem little better than the ones that Mr Wells had in mind. Perhaps I am wrong, but I can't believe that courses like "Feminist Knowledges: Challenges and Subversions", or "Soap Dish: The Politics of Popular Narrative", are really likely to encourage intellectual rigour or a maturity and independence of thought.
Nearly all universities now have flourishing marketing departments producing glossy promotional brochures, stunning internet sites, and a panoply of advertising which promise potential students an irresistible mixture of educational excellence, career success and pure fun. These departments solicit testimonials from students which tell of finding love, a wonderful job, and the meaning of life while obtaining their Bachelor of Cultural Studies or Master of Wisdom.
A simple anecdote can illustrate the consequences of such an approach. I recently visited the library of my local university to read an article in the American journal Science, which is arguably the most important academic journal of its type in the English-speaking world.
Although the university offers a science degree, I discovered that the library does not carry this journal. However it does subscribe to Vogue Living, Australian Bodyboarder, Surfing World, and a number of other lifestyle and recreational magazines. Certainly, these are enjoyable publications. Yet they are also evidence of a university with a strange set of priorities.
When criticised for surrendering their institutions to the very consumerism that academics are so quick to denounce everywhere else in our society, vice-chancellors declare that universities now have to be part of the "real world". But attempts to emulate supermarkets and theme parks show a fundamental misunderstanding about the place of universities in the "real world", and the characteristics of good university teaching. There can be no disputing that universities had to change to provide an education suitable for the economic and social environment of the coming century, which will place a great premium on having well-educated citizens with strong conceptual skills.
But unfortunately, there are a number of indications that universities are moving in the opposite direction. Many academics talk, both publicly and privately, of the "dumbing down" of universities, as their administrations, with the collusion of other academics, pursue growth for growth's sake.
As the distinguished historian Emeritus Professor Frank Crowley writes in his privately published recent book, Degrees Galore: Australia's Academic Teller Machines, this "quality-ignoring chase for student numbers" has damaging consequences: "falling standards of admission and assessment, the fragmenting of knowledge into smaller and smaller units of speciality, the wasteful duplication of many degree programs, and chronic degree inflation".
And in an article published in Quadrant last year, Associate Professor Harry Clarke from La Trobe University made similar criticisms, claiming that "increasingly poor courses and programs have driven out the good in universities ... Far from encouraging excellence by offering intellectual challenge, courses are designed not to exclude even the academically weakest".
In a sense, many universities are operating something akin to a pyramid sales racket. As the quality of the bachelor degree declines, more and more graduates feel compelled to enrol in higher degree courses, thus bringing in more funds and other benefits to the universities.
In 1988 around 30,000 students were studying for higher degrees in Australian universities. By 1998 the number had rocketed to 88,000. This massive rise is all the more remarkable given the introduction of substantial course fees in the intervening period.
No doubt some of this increase can be justified in terms of the higher levels of knowledge and skill required for success in many vocations. But a very significant part of the increase is almost certainly the result of graduates attempting to retain the competitive advantage they were promised when they began studying for their first degree.
Eventually, masters and Ph.D. degrees will become almost as devalued as the bachelor degree. Then some entrepreneurial university will introduce an even higher degree, and we will see thousands of people with doctorates enrolling for a Knighthood of Knowledge.
The opening up -- or "dumbing down" -- of universities has been done in the name of improving equity. But in the long term, it is likely to have the opposite effect. As university degrees become increasingly useless as a yardstick of genuine achievement, other considerations will become correspondingly important for success in life -- family connections, old school ties, and similar things that rightly upset egalitarians.
And while a degree was once pretty well a degree, no matter where it was obtained, there is a rapidly increasing status differentiation among Australia's 39 universities. This differentiation is not always soundly based -- there are some areas of excellence in low-status regional universities, and pockets of real educational horror in some elite universities.
Throwing more money at universities is not going to solve this particular problem. But one step in the right direction is the Federal government's plan to introduce a national voluntary performance test for students at the end of their undergraduate course, which would assess fundamental conceptual and practical skills. Such a test would help to assess whether universities really are meeting their obligations to students and the wider society.
And, providing the test was demanding enough to achieve widespread credibility among employers and the public, it could reduce the need that bright students might otherwise feel to proceed to unnecessary second and higher degrees in which they have little interest. A nationally certified bachelor's degree could become a better measure of educational attainment -- and therefore more desirable -- than an uncertified higher degree. Universities would hate it.
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