Melbourne Modeling
There’s no category for ‘uni shakeup’.
The Melboune Model is being launched today, and if you don’t know what that means… join many other people. The Vice-Chancellor says, “It is a distinctively Australian response to a well-established international trend in higher education.” Sounds good to me!
Actually, the only thing I know about the restructuring is that a friend here for Gender Studies found that her program had become Development and Gender Studies. She’s now learning about all sort of things she has no idea about, and, quite honestly, never cared to learn. She’s a terrible person.
I kid.
Anyway, if you’re interested in finding out more about the model - and honestly, it’s something quite new so it should be groundbreaking if nothing else - you can learn about it here.
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In a nutshell, it’s the start of a move towards a US-style system, with fairly general 3-year undergraduate degrees followed by specialised 2-year masters degrees for actual professional qualifications (or 3-year research PhDs, of course). So now you can’t (for instance) enroll in an undergraduate law degree, you have to do a generalist undergraduate degree first and then enroll in a master of law programme.
In theory, it does work better and, hey, produce much brighter students. Minus the fact that it’s now going to cost a little more to be a specialist in any field, and then for some it’ll be like college all over again.
I’m a little curious how it works for Arts though, when we’re all already technically quite vague in everything…
Oops. I just realised my major is also gone. Haha!
A cynic might say it’s a neat way for Melbourne to make a little more from its students and appear pretentious in the process… two things they seemed to absolutely love doing while i was there…
Well, we’ve gotta go with our strengths :)