I’m proud of my rip-off degree

Whenever the right gets itself in a froth over ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, I keep my head down. You see, I am the holder of such a qualification: a degree in film and television studies. I rush to point out that my student days preceded the global financial crisis. There were so many jobs sloshing around that we could dismiss criticism of these courses as a tabloid trope. 

Let me describe the labour market that awaited meedja students in the mid-2000s. Every Monday, I’d pick up the Guardian at the student union. This was the old frumpy Guardian, before it slipped into a sleek little Berliner number, and inside was wedged The Bible: Media Guardian. God, it was glorious. Priggish, inky, eminently tearable, but glorious. Because once you skipped past a dozen finger-wagging articles about Rebekah Wade (as Mrs Brooks then was), you hit the recruitment ads.