The Cover
Unconventional Education
Dare to be different? An inside look at some unusual degrees and why students are signing up.
By Nick Harland
“Students are picking subjects that they're really interested in and you can really tell that in the quality of the assignments.”
Bart P. Roccoberton Jr has been a professional puppet artist for nearly 50 years. He has staged shows in the United States, China, Taiwan, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, France and various other countries. He has even been proclaimed as ‘North America’s Chancellor of Puppetry Education and Training for the Twenty-First Century’ by Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA); the global association for puppeteers worldwide.
But one of the most noticeable things about Roccoberton’s CV is that he is also a university lecturer. He heads up the MA in Puppet Arts at the University of Connecticut, said to be the only degree of its kind in the United States. Quite frankly, you’d struggle to find a similar degree anywhere in the world.
“Although there are other puppetry training programmes around the world, many offer certificates of accomplishment or diplomas rather than accredited academic degrees. So, UConn Puppet Arts is a unique programme of study, internationally,” Roccoberton explains.
“In the course, our students exercise their imaginations while learning to conceive an idea. They develop scripts and storyboards, design sets, costumes, lights and sound as well as puppets. They fabricate using hand, power and digital tools to perform with different genres of puppet for stage, film, television and digital media.”
The MA in Puppet Arts isn’t unique in its uniqueness, however. Universities worldwide offer degrees in fields as varied as horology (the study of time), circus directing (‘developed to address a need across the global circus community to create a new kind of performance director’), stand-up comedy, comic art, costume technology, manga, winemaking and even foresight (which teaches students how to predict future events). Sadly, there’s no sign yet of a degree in hindsight.
Exposure to these types of courses is probably minimal: a brief news segment (Harvard’s recently-introduced Taylor Swift module springs to mind), or perhaps a spot in a ‘top 10 most bizarre degrees’ listicles. It probably raised a laugh, but might’ve also raised a bit of a snort, followed by the inevitable questions: “Why on earth would anyone want to study that?”
However, universities run on tight budgets, and new degrees aren’t just founded for a bit of fun. There must be solid business sense behind such decisions and they need to prove themselves as being valuable - not just to the university, but to wider society. These unusual degrees are no different.
Ceri Houlbrook is the programme leader of the MA in Folklore Studies at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. In her course, students learn all there is to know about the beliefs and traditions that bind cultures together. They look at how folklore is defined, its history, contemporary traditions, migrations of beliefs and how those beliefs adapt to new environments.
Houlbrook believes there is a place for degrees like hers in higher education. "I think there's something to be said for doing things that we're interested in but still have value to society,” she tells QS Insights Magazine. “And there's never a sense that students are here because they need to be here. They're coming because they love the subject and want to talk about it. It makes a real difference knowing it's not just about the qualification."
What’s more, Houlbrook argues that the programme offers genuine value to students on both a personal and professional level. “It's not just some frivolous subject where you can come and have fun for a year and you're not taking anything beyond that,” she says. “A lot of the skills that folklorists graduate with are relevant to lots of other disciplines. The central one is the ability to understand your own culture and understand other people's culture. That means communication and seeing value in other people come a lot more naturally to a folklorist."
The MA in Folklore Studies tends to attract between 10 and 20 students in any given year. That may not seem like a lot, but keeping student numbers within that range is vital to maintaining the informal, workshop-style format of the course. "Any more than that would really ruin the atmosphere that we're trying to create,” says Houlbrook.
And especially with higher education, numbers are important. If Houlbrook’s course drops below 10 attendees, they’re at risk of being cut. Similarly, if pass rates dip then administrators are likely to place folklore studies in their sights. But they remain strong. “Students are picking subjects that they're really interested in,” says Houlbrook, “and you can really tell that in the quality of the assignments.”
As for what happens afterwards, a Master’s in folklore studies is more open-ended than you might think. Houlbrook’s students have gone on to work in museums, join heritage organisations, become teachers, complete PhDs, write books… and they’ve also simply been “doing great at opening people's eyes to the relevance of folklore and how it's still very much around today”.
If puppet arts and folklore studies seem a bit left-field, the bachelor’s degree in Bakery Science and Management at Kansas State University (KSU) is a little more oven-ready for the world of work. Launched over 60 years ago, it prepares students for a career in the baking industry, specifically for global baking companies such as Grupo Bimbo and Montelez that produce bread, cookies and other grain-based foodstuffs. Again, it’s the only degree of its kind in the US.
"We focus a lot on the science of baking, so what happens to the ingredients when you're making bread or a cake,” explains programme leader Aaron Clanton. “As people graduate, they often end up in careers where they're creating new baking products or maybe working in facilities that make the products."
It’s another programme which may seem unusual, but it’s actually targeting a highly specific area of the enormous global baking industry, which is valued at an estimated $536 billion. "There are universities that do baking or pastry arts, but they seem to have tied more into the restaurant or culinary aspect of things,” says Clanton. “Whereas nobody else is tied into the broader food production industry. It's not a very ‘thought-of’ career path. It's not the fun, glamorous side of the food industry - but it's an important part of the food industry nevertheless.”
The highly-targeted niche is proving fruitful for Clanton’s programme, and for KSU more widely. Graduates of the programme have a 100 percent job placement record after five years, with average salaries ranging between US$50k and $70k. According to Clanton, that’s above the university average. He also points to strong retention rates as key to demonstrating the viability of the degree.
Roccoberton’s puppetry graduates can point to similarly strong employment outcomes. They have gone on to work with the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple Network, Disney+ and Paramount, as well as on various Broadway productions. “With the film industry re-discovering the efficiency of practical effects, they are also appearing in such films as the sequels of Star Wars and Jurassic Park, among many others,” adds Roccoberton.
It’s difficult to argue with the results - but degrees like these still face existential threats. That’s partly because of the perceptions surrounding them (who here didn’t scoff when they first heard about a module on Taylor Swift?), and partly because of growing financial pressures on universities all over the world. Clanton holds an MBA and teaches management alongside baking, so he knows all too well about the commercial side of higher education. He understands that a programme like Bakery Science and Management is likely to face extra scrutiny from school administrators.
"I do think unique degrees have a lot of competing forces, because in the current environment where higher ed is having challenges with budgets and numbers and students, I do think it puts these unique degrees in the crosshairs. When you make cuts, you look at the low hanging fruit, and maybe these programmes can look like the low hanging fruit."
Houlbrook, too, is aware that programmes like Folklore Studies will be in jeopardy when budget constraints are brought up. "Sadly, the university sector being what it is, it's largely number-driven,” she says. Still, as long as her programme can stay above that magic 10 student mark, the strong pass rate and employment rate are likely to keep the wolf from the door - for now, at least.
As universities face greater budget pressures than ever before, pressure on unusual degrees like these is unlikely to go away anytime soon. And whilst it’s easy to scoff at these programmes, it’s worth remembering that they have to demonstrate their worth just as much as any other degree - perhaps even more so.
As long as they can keep proving that worth, there can and should be a place for these unusual degrees in the higher education landscape. "As fun as it is, it's not just frivolous fun,” says Houlbrook. “It really has value."