In Monday’s Herald news article ‘More majors likely under new budget‘, university officials claimed that the controversial New Badger Partnership is likely to streamline the process of designing new degree programs at the University of Wisconsin, both undergraduate and postgraduate. The increased freedom will thus allow more programs to be created, increasing the number of majors and postgraduate degree programs available to UW students.
On the other hand, the Partnership is also expected to help make it even easier to cut programs that lack demand. Currently, the Regents’ approval is not necessary to cut a program – only a report is needed. As a result, many programs have been and continue to be eliminated: In the past two years, at least two undergraduate majors and three postgraduate programs have been cut.
The so-called ‘flexibility’ with the creation and elimination of programs should spell trouble to those who realize that academic programs are not merely things that should come and go. Academic programs should not follow the ever-changing demands of students, being offered one year and closing down another year, while students are still enrolled in those no longer popular programs.
As a leading public university, UW should take pride in the high quality of academic programs it offers. While a diversity of programs is a necessity, it does not need to verge on the excessive with obscure programs that could have been amalgamated into programs that are less specific. With over a hundred majors or programs being offered, for both undergraduate and postgraduate programs, UW’s current offering is definitely enough to fulfill the needs of most students.
Indeed, a strong point that can be made comes from the cost of financing programs. Academic programs incur significant costs to design, run and even strip. As such, the flexibility of creating and eliminating programs will waste much of the university’s ever limited budget. This will deter from another goal that is more worthy, that is to focus on quality, and not just quantity, of programs.
Having a multitude of programs, a limited number of faculty and staff running them and a limited budget will lead to the inevitability of basic algebra: There will not be enough work force to manage each program. When this happens, there will necessarily be at least a few programs that are of poor quality. Those programs, while supposedly fulfilling a niche, will not do any good, for the school or for the students enrolling in them. A graduate of an extremely specific yet poorly designed academic program will probably find it much harder to find employment than another graduate of a more general yet reputable program.
This is especially true for graduate programs. A master’s degree or a Ph.D. is supposed to teach people to be experts in a field. For that purpose to be fulfilled, having a top quality program with reputable faculty, adequate number of staff and excellent facilities – all of which are costly – are extremely important. Offering a program with a mediocre faculty, a department short of staff and budget facilities is not what the topnotch institution of UW deserves, nor should aspire to be.
On the other hand, in undergraduate education there are also reasons to not expand the number of majors excessively. Undergraduate majors that are too specific are often not very useful, since expertise in a specific field is not always the purpose of education up to a bachelor’s degree. It is a well-known fact that many undergraduates end up taking jobs that are unrelated to their field. This illustrates how it is unnecessary to offer more choices when it is compensated by them being of poorer quality.
Nonetheless, the increased flexibility of proposing new programs might also allow an increase in the number of internships and co-ops. As these tend to consume less funding and their introduction or elimination do not bring as much disruption to students’ education, there is still probably some welcome change that we can look forward to through the New Badger Partnership.
Albert Budhipramono ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in biology.
