Students can now study for degrees in gambling, beer, golf or rugby, writes Rosita Boland
Got your Leaving Cert results? Wondering what to do with them? Forget the days when students had to choose between familiar academic subjects in the areas of arts, humanities and the sciences. You can now learn in college hours things that students used to pursue only during after-college hours. It sounds like an ad for a well-known beer, but the reality is that you can now take courses in playing rugby, pulling pints, being in a band, and gambling.
This week, the TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) in Britain published a list of what it has described as 401 university "non-courses" what the British media have gleefully called "Mickey Mouse courses". The TPA argues that taxpayers are paying more than £40 million (€59 million) a year to subsidise courses which it believes are unsuitable to be included on any university syllabus.
Among them are culinary arts and adventure tourism at the University of Derby. "We offer regular guest demonstrations and table service training, wine courses and a look at the anthropology of food. As well as practical training, you'll study aspects of world cuisine, the history of food and the diversity of culinary arts." There's also golf management, at Scotland's UHI Millennium Institute. "The course provides a high-quality qualification with a comprehensive understanding of the modern golf industry. Regular field trips to courses such as St Andrews and Carnoustie are a feature of the course."
There's more. The Swansea Institute of Higher Education offers activity and play leadership. At the University of Central Lancashire, you can study adventure travel, where "You will have plenty of opportunities to experience a variety of outdoor pursuits and will be encouraged to achieve additional outdoor activity qualifications".
Believe it or not, this autumn, you can enrol on a course which ensures that when you graduate, you will be working for a billionaire. The UK Sailing Academy, at Cowes, has designed a course to train crew to skipper luxury super-yachts. There are now apparently so many obscenely wealthy people who have commissioned the design of their own private sailing boats and motorboats that there just aren't enough skilled staff to crew them. The UK Sailing Academy estimates there are 10,500 super- yachts cruising the world's waters. Hiring crew members who know what they are doing helps owners to protect such investments.
John Ely, chief executive of the UK Sailing Academy, estimates there is currently a demand for 4,000 qualified crew members.
The luxury-crew course may just be starting up, but for the past 20 years, students have been graduating from the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling, based at the school of life sciences of Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University. This four-year course aims at giving students an understanding of the science and technology involved in managing a brewery. At the latter end of their studies, students must work for at least eight weeks in a maltings, brewery or distillery in order to pass their degree. With all that experience to draw on, students at Heriot-Watt must have the best-organised student parties in Britain.
Then there's the opportunity to take a degree in business economics with gambling studies, at the University of Salford, Manchester. The university's website explains, "This unique degree was created in response to the need for a more academic approach to the study of gambling and commercial gaming. Students learn about economics, focusing on the use of economic theory in the analysis of business problems, and examine gambling from an economic, social, cultural and mathematical perspective." Students also have "the possibility of vacation employment in the industry".
Closer to home, this year, the Institute of Technology at Carlow offers a BA in sport and rugby. The first course of its kind in Britain or Ireland, it's being run in conjunction with the Irish Rugby Football Union and Leinster Rugby. Students will be expected to show their rugby-playing skills, so presumably each candidate will be getting down and dirty to compete for one of 20 course places. The course combines coaching, fitness, player development and a business or communications module. What rugby students do in their spare time might be a question for the philosophy students.