My Mickey Mouse Philosophy Masters Explained

The Ancient Question of What Education Is For

My friends regularly joke that the Open University is not a real university and philosophy is not a real degree. The joke feels harmless, yet it persists because it expresses something that is widely believed. Education is increasingly judged not by what it teaches, but by what it produces.

That belief is now explicit in politics, where politicians across the UK speak openly about limiting student numbers, cutting courses, and demanding value for money. The language is economic and degrees are discussed in terms of return on investment, while subjects are evaluated according to graduate salaries. Education is no longer assumed to be good in itself and must justify its existence through employment statistics.

The phrase “Mickey Mouse degrees” captures this attitude perfectly because some subjects are dismissed as unserious when they do not lead directly to a profession. Philosophy regularly appears on these lists alongside literature, sociology, and media studies, carrying the implication that a degree lacking a clear job outcome lacks legitimacy. This is not really an argument about universities, it is a much older disagreement about what knowledge is for.

In ancient Athens, education already divided into two paths. There were the practical arts, what the Greeks called technē, skills with obvious application such as medicine, engineering, or trade, and on the other hand philosophical disciplines concerned with truth, ethics, and understanding for their own sake.

Socrates insisted the second mattered more, while his opponents saw education primarily as preparation for success in public life. The Sophists, his rivals, taught rhetoric and persuasion for a fee, and their students learned how to win arguments and advance politically, giving their education clear market value. Socrates taught for free and often left students more uncertain than before, which by modern employability standards would appear as failure. Athens eventually concluded something similar and executed him because teaching people to question assumptions was considered socially dangerous.

This ancient dispute never disappeared and simply reappears whenever societies ask what universities are for. When education is judged entirely by labour market outcomes, predictable changes follow. Subjects become ranked by earning potential; universities compete to demonstrate economic usefulness, and students become customers purchasing credentials rather than participants pursuing understanding. Knowledge turns into a commodity whose value depends on employer demand.

We are already living through this transformation as universities face financial pressure, departments merge or close, and courses survive only if they attract enough paying students. Education begins to resemble a marketplace in which unpopular ideas quietly disappear.

The loss is often described in financial or institutional terms. However, philosophy asks a different question, what actually disappears when a philosophy department closes?

Not only jobs or modules vanish, what disappears is a certain kind of thinking.

Philosophy does not train you for a profession; it trains you to question professions. It teaches you to examine assumptions, recognise when language obscures meaning, and distinguish argument from persuasion. These skills are awkward from a market perspective because they make people sceptical, independent, and difficult to manipulate. Employers rarely advertise for graduates who will question the premise of their work since organisations tend to prefer efficiency over reflection, even though societies depend on people capable of asking whether systems themselves are justified.

This explains why Plato wrote dialogues rather than instruction manuals. Dialogue cannot be easily standardised or measured because questions lead to answers that collapse into further questions. No one finishes with certainty, yet everyone finishes thinking differently, and that transformation resists grading, metrics, and monetisation, which is precisely why it matters. The political debate often claims to be economic, although the economics are inconsistent. Many critics of humanities degrees themselves studied humanities at elite universities, suggesting the real divide concerns access rather than subject matter.

Humanities education is praised as cultivation when pursued by the privileged and dismissed as indulgence when pursued by everyone else.

That distinction matters because education has long been one of the few ways individuals without wealth or connections could develop intellectual independence. When universities shift toward purely vocational training, that pathway narrows and higher education becomes less transformative and more stratified.

There is also a practical flaw in judging degrees purely by employment outcomes because it assumes we know what future jobs will require. Technological change, particularly artificial intelligence, is already reshaping professional work in unpredictable ways, meaning that training students for specific roles that may not exist in a decade is less practical than it appears.

Teaching people how to think, adapt, and learn may be the only reliable preparation for uncertainty.

This brings us back to the Open University. The joke that it is not a real university reveals hidden assumptions about legitimacy, since traditional universities signal prestige through buildings, selectivity, and social tradition, while the Open University offers flexible learning, mature students, and access beyond conventional academic pathways. If education exists to maintain hierarchy, the traditional model succeeds. If education exists to develop minds wherever they are found, the Open University may better fulfil the purpose.

How we judge these institutions reveals what we believe education is for, since every society must decide whether universities reproduce existing social structures or challenge them, whether they produce compliant workers or critical citizens, and whether knowledge has value beyond its price.

Athens chose stability over questioning when it executed Socrates, a decision that protected existing power for a time even though the questions survived through Plato’s writings. Ideas rarely disappear and instead move elsewhere. If philosophy and the humanities retreat into elite spaces, questioning will not end and will instead become a privilege rather than a shared capacity. The majority will receive training while a minority receives education.

The real test of an education system is not how efficiently it produces workers but what kinds of thinking it makes possible. When people joke that philosophy is not a real degree, they repeat an ancient claim that only immediately useful knowledge counts, a claim that has always served a political purpose as much as a practical one. Every society must eventually decide whether education exists to create independent minds or merely technically competent workers who can operate systems without questioning them. There are always those in positions of power who benefit from the second outcome, since a population trained to perform tasks is easier to manage than a population trained to think critically about why those tasks exist at all. The choice now facing higher education is therefore stark, we can preserve universities as places that cultivate judgement, doubt, and intellectual independence, or we can allow them to become efficient training mechanisms serving economic demand alone.

One path produces citizens capable of questioning power, the other produces workers prepared only to serve it, and deciding between them is not an administrative adjustment but a decision about the kind of society we intend to become.