1. This is a graduate degree.
2. Part of the degree is doctorate type of stuff (research methodology). This content is definitely needed. The other part is stuff that is unique to universities, and it is all over the map — finance (including fund raising), policy, governance, student development, campus culture, etc.
You can’t just take a random professor or a random business person and expect them to be a good university administrator. It’s a topic worthy of research and study, imho.
All that said, many of the folks I know who majored in this field absolutely drink the kool-aid and are mostly full of shit. I personally think that’s due to the folks who are shaping the areas of discourse in this field (mostly in a very near-term sort of way that lacks vision) more than it being an issue of the field being fundamentally flawed itself.
This is the flagship state school. It’s hardly some random school. If this program is not at this school in the state, it won’t be at any school.
If you’re not from the US, every state has a “flagship” state school. Some have a comparably strong second school that usually covers agriculture and engineering (these are the A&M schools).
West Virginia only has one major state school, and WVU is that school.
As a non-american, I am baffled by this way of thinking. Higher education is supposed to be a way to ensure that a state is self-sufficient in terms of some core competencies by retaining a small number of workers specialized in compiling, developing, and sharing industry knowledge.
Is West Virginia so empoverished that they can't manage to support the two dozen or so teachers required to support an engineering degree?
There are various regional associations to address this sort of issue. A college friend, a Virginia native, wanted to pursue a master's in library science, but Virginia did not offer one. North Carolina did, and so through one of those multi-state compacts, he went to UNC and paid in-state tuition.
We don't expect towns of 2000 people to support a high school. They go to a regional school - perhaps only one high school per county.
Tennessee is legally divided into Western, Middle, and Eastern Tennessee. There are a lot of rules in the state constitution that respect these Grand Divisions; IIRC an equal number of TN Supreme Court justices must be from each division, etc.
Anyway, the University of Tennessee is in Knoxville, which is in the Eastern Division (and a long way from Memphis). The University of Mississippi, in Oxford, is only about an hour and a half away from Memphis. For many years, students living in at least metro Memphis (and possibly most of Western Tennessee) could attend Ole Miss and pay in-state tuition - which is why in The Blind Side, the family were Ole Miss supporters. Memphis is the cultural capital of the Delta region, which covers parts of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and Ole Miss (though not in the Delta) was the natural flagship university for the area.
Tennessee just paid Mississippi for its students. It was cheaper than building another university that would only have attracted students from a relatively small portion of the state.
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Legitimate fields of study usually do not have trouble establishing their legitimacy to ordinary people. My undergraduate degree is in aerospace engineering. I’ve never had to argue from authority to get people to accept that’s a legitimate field that produces actionable facts.
I'm not sure that's true. The US system is staggeringly wasteful, partly because there are 50 states and thousands of school districts all making out that they are unique and different and need to find their own ways of doing things (a critique which could be leveled at the US more generally). This is an invitation to corruption and endless politicking.
Amid all the various studies and reports and education manifestos, you know what I never hear? Of policies derived from surveying students about what they think and what does or does not work for them. Generally when I bring this point up it gets dismissed with some variation of 'students will just ask for more time off and less work and standards will crumble' which I don't think has any basis in fact.
This is good as a first step. Better would be Higher Education Administration Administration, a PhD-level field dedicated to the theory and practice of administrating academic programs about higher education administration.
Not to make an obvious boring comment, but: someone was offering a college degree in this? Yeesh. Bloat begets bloat, I guess.
I guess maybe that's overly cynical. Post-secondary education is important, and it follows that we would want people to figure out how to best deliver it. But hard not to judge that, just a little bit.