It is almost a cliché these days to discuss the cutting of the humanities. Just this year the Studies of Religion major was discontinued, and the philosophy department gutted. If high school students looked at past handbooks they would see hundreds of classes that are no more.
Instead, Arts students starting in 2025 are allegedly being offered a whole seven new degrees to choose from. This includes a flashy new Politics Philosophy and Economics (PPE) course as well as new degrees in Media, Languages, and International Studies.
The latter three are less new degrees, and more the university finally moving away from the Advanced Studies model which began in 2016. A University spokesperson confirmed to Honi Soit that the Advanced Studies streams in Politics and International Relations, Media and Communications, and Languages (sound familiar?) will no longer be available starting next year.
Advanced Studies was part of a bizarre controversy earlier this year when the University was forced to admit it had made an embarrassing regulatory error making the degree invalid. While the University created new exit pathways to solve the problem, the embarrassment and widespread confusion around the program surely influenced the decision to start pivoting to new degrees instead.
For the very few at Usyd who understand what Advanced Studies is, the University would like you to know that the degree will still be available for Arts, Science, Economics, and Commerce students next year and those still in streams will be able to complete their courses.
Not only do the new degrees have the same names as their predecessors, but also the same ATAR requirements and largely the same unit descriptions. When I asked if the new degrees included newly developed units, the University largely ducked the question. There is a new ‘International Studies’ major but if anything that is a vaguer version of global studies or politics and international relations.
Whether the marketing trick of renaming Arts degrees works on students and employers is hard to know, but it certainly worked on me. When I was choosing my course in year 12, the idea of a “double degree”, or “advanced coursework”, or a “shared pool of majors” worked wonders, making me preach to my friends that the Usyd arts degree was structured in a ‘superior’ way.
Usyd is not alone in going down this path. ANU has even more Arts degrees to choose from. What is the difference between a Bachelor of Pacific Studies and a Bachelor of Asian Pacific Affairs? Who knows! What are just majors at most universities in the world like European or Asian Studies are now whole courses.
The introduction of PPE, while more novel, is concerning for other reasons. The Oxford based degree is spreading across Australia like wildfire, with most universities adding it to their options in the past decade. ANU and UNSW both did so in 2016 and 2019 respectively. There is nothing inherently wrong or special with that combination of disciplines, but students can already take all of them within a traditional Arts degree. That begs the question, why the new name?
Firstly, the Oxbridge heritage creates an element of constructed prestige. As Andy Beckett, writing for the Guardian, pointed out years ago, a disproportionate amount of the political elite — including former Conservative Prime Minister’s Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, and David Cameron — took PPE. It is not uncommon for a policy in Parliament to be debated by PPE graduates as another commentates in the media.
Australian universities have latched onto that marketing, with UNSW telling prospective students in 2019 that they can take the same degree as “some of the most distinguished political and thought leaders from around the world.” Because this degree is for supposed thought leaders, universities can also rack up the ATAR with Usyd asking for 91, 11 points higher than an Arts degree.
This would be fine if the degree offered anything new but the only three units that are exclusively for PPE students have titles that sound borderline satirical: BPPE1000 ‘Politics and Philosophy’, BPPE2000 ‘Economics and Political Economy’, and BPPE3000 ‘Philosophy and Political Economy.’
Imagine walking into a unit called “English and History” or “Biology and Chemistry.” Students would be better off taking the majors outside the degree to avoid something so general. It is unfortunate that a former Honi editor, Juliette Marchant, has hopped on the gravy train, doing a flashy interview with Usyd’s PR team to promote the course.
Increasing the number of labels students can have on their diploma is masking a slow, painful march away from choice in Australian Arts degrees. My Ancient Greek Democracies lecturer informed the class last week that this was the last time this unit would be taught. “In the university’s infinite wisdom,” he said, the Athens focused unit would be merged with another Ancient History unit focused on Sparta.
The spokesperson maintained that the new degrees did provide “more options” to students telling Honi that they were “excited to be expanding on our comprehensive range of bachelor’s degrees – which draw on a broad range of disciplinary expertise across the University and build on our academic strengths, industry partnerships and global network.”
Moving away from Advanced Studies may be welcome, but the larger trend is darker. Students, according to universities, demand choice when perusing a catalogue on Year 12 Open Day, only to forget about it as soon as classes actually start.
