Wrong! Crazy courses are a long-time college tradition. But even in the wake of the Great Recession, course catalogs are still loaded with goofy, lightweight classes, and students still are lining up to take them. Many of these offbeat offerings are consistently enrolled to capacity, and some, like “Geology and Cinema” or “Sport for the Spectator” are among the most popular classes on campus. On a per-credit basis, these classes cost just as much as organic chemistry or applied physics.
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But students today often aren’t very interested in those more traditional offerings, says Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory who wrote The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30). Instead they buy into – and contribute to – what Bauerlein calls “the progressive dumbification of the college curriculum.”
Colleges and universities contribute to the problem by focusing on selling themselves instead of delivering a good education, he says. In an increasingly business-like world of higher education, appealing to high school seniors with a hip course catalog brings in more applications, which allows a school to be choosier, which in turn gives a university a higher selectivity ranking – a hot commodity in a fiercely competitive industry.
“If you kept [college] requirements high and kept courses demanding and rigorous, you’re going to get a lot of dropouts and dropouts are embarrassing to universities,” Bauerlein says.
Here is our own (somewhat arbitrary) list of the 10 silliest college courses – and how much they cost. All of these are real courses at colleges and universities across the U.S. Some of them are offered every year, some every term; all remain part of the curriculum at their respective colleges.
Click here to see the courses >
This post originally appeared at The Fiscal Times.
Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame
University of South Carolina, Columbia
$1,200 in-state; $3,150 out-of-state
3 credits
Enrollment: N/A
Quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes in the course description doesn’t succeed in making this offering seem legitimate. The course promises to introduce sociology students to an analysis of “selected social issues related to the career of Lady Gaga.” At least the students may pop out their earbuds to study Gaga.
The Phallus
Occidental College
$5,370 (based on eight-course-per-year load)
Enrollment: 15 Capacity
The Phallus: What more is there to say? Apparently a whole semester’s worth if you’re an Occidental College student. (They also offer a course called, “Stupidity.” Really) The Phallus promises survey of everything from the relation of the phallus to masculinity (sounds pretty basic) to the “whiteness of the phallus” (huh?). If a school can charge more than 5K to discuss a basic part of human anatomy, somebody’s getting screwed.
Joy of Garbage
Santa Clara University
$4,881 (based on 4-course average load)
4 credits
Enrollment: 38 (capacity: 40)
Students "follow the path of our waste products" which are apparently all “dumped on minority communities or shipped abroad.” While the search for sustainable solutions to waste problems is an important topic, Santa Clara University is collecting a whole lot of cash to teach students about bottle deposits.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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