Identifying “mickey mouse” courses

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.