A report out from Universities UK and the Confederation of British Industries says that further links between industry and higher education make sense, and give an example of Ford sponsoring Loughborough University's BSc Automotive Dealership Management (offered through the Business School's Centre for Automotive Management). 
On this course, one does modules in management, human resources, the 'automotive retail environment', accounting, financial management, marketing, operations management, and a research project.
This leaves me rather speechless. I mean, seriously? Automotive Dealership Management can't really be the future of higher education. Perhaps I'm just an stuck-up elitist peering down from my ivory tower, but, the very idea of doing a degree in how to run a car dealership is mind-boggling.
I think universities should say to the CBI and other businesses: if you want to set up bodies to train employees for you, set up a company and do it yourself. If I want to train people to mow a lawn or write a piece of computer software, I can't just whinge and whinge until universities train them for me. Universities are universities and business is business. It's not the job of the university to play fiddle to the tune of the CBI. Universities should do what they were started to do: give a broad and liberal education in the arts and sciences. If such training is of use to those in business, fine. If they are unsatisfied, they are free to set up their own training courses, set up companies to administer that training and certify those who have passed such training (as, for better or worse, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Sun, Novell and other technology companies have done for computer engineers, technicians and programmers).
It is a profoundly unfair use of public funds for universities to provide education with the subsidy of the state that favours particular industries and companies. To use the computing example: imagine if the government decided that they should replace Computer Science degrees with something that's half-way between a Computer Science degree and an MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer). The courses that were offered would be shifted to be based around Windows, .NET and other Microsoft technologies. All the universities would turn out lots of great C# programmers and people familiar with the innards of Microsoft software. That's great for the companies that are in the Microsoft ecosystem - but what of the Unix/Linux/open source-based companies, the companies in the Apple ecosystem and so on. The public subsidy of one industry's training is an indirect subsidy of that industry itself. How do we decide whether to spend more resources on Automotive Retail Management or on Golf Course Management, or maybe Hotel Management, or Computing?
I think there's a reason why we should have courses in Computer Science and not in Automotive Retail Management. There's some tough intellectual problems - worthy of having people spend time in universities figuring them out - in Computer Science which just don't exist in running car dealerships. Yes, that makes other people declare me a snob. And, no, I don't care.
There's one thing you can definitely say about philosophy: it's not going to be biased towards any large commercial interests (it does, occasionally, get biased towards large religious or ideological interests, but that's another matter). That is code, by the way, for "I've got a philosophy degree and need some form of paid employment".
