26 August 2023 , 19:23
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Rishi Sunak donated £3m to an LA university which offers its students courses on ghosts, the fandango and “being French”, it can be revealed.
Despite the Tories’ 'crack down on low value courses' here in the UK, the PM and wife Akshata Murthy have been high level donors to Claremont McKenna college over many years.
The Prime Minister personally lashed out at "rip-off degrees" in July this year while pledging to "boost skills training and apprenticeships provision".
As pupils picked up their A-level results on Thursday, Mr Sunak tweeted: “Results day is important, but not necessarily a deal-breaker. Whatever results you got today, there are lots of options available to you.” But availability and take-up of apprenticeships have declined since the Tories came to power, according to Labour ’s analysis of official data from the Department for Education.
Matt Western, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Higher Education said: “This hypocrite Prime Minister in one breath slams UK universities for offering so-called ‘rip off degrees’ while donating a small fortune to a US university charging tens of thousands of thousands for courses for some of the wealthiest families on the planet. Meanwhile apprenticeships have vanished from England over the past 13 years of Conservative government, not least in the Prime Minister’s own region of Yorkshire.”
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Apprenticeships starts have fallen by 31 percent since 2015, when Rishi Sunak was first elected to Parliament, from 509,360 to 349,190. Completions have halved since 2015, from 271,660 to 137,220. And in Yorkshire, where Mr Sunak’s Richmond constituency lies, the number of apprenticeship completions has more than halved since 2015 from 33,790 to 15,830.
Mr Western added: “For young people looking to plan a future under this current government, they would be better off buying a crystal ball than looking to this PM for any answers.”
Mr Sunak was branded “out of touch” when the Mirror revealed he and his wife’s “staggering” donations to the private college. Mrs Murthy graduated from Claremont McKenna in 2022, with a degree majoring in economics and French. She and the PM have funded a professorship in their names at the institution, and are named on the ‘founders wall’ of high level donors at the college. In 2018 the couple gave a further $3 million to fund the ‘Murty Sunak Quantitative and Computing Lab’, named after them.
As a member of Claremont McKenna’s Board of Trustees, Mrs Murthy sits on the panel that determines the academic matters of her former university, providing “assessment of the effectiveness of academic departments and programs”. The school is part of the Claremont Colleges group, seven private institutions which pool resources and allow students to take modules taught at any of the schools. Students can expect to pay $64,000 per year for tuition, or almost £50,000.
Among the courses open to attendees at Claremont McKenna is 'Ghosts and the Machines’, taught at nearby Harvey Mudd College, which is advertised as an “exploration of the interrelations between occult mediumship, modern media, and technology.” The module includes lessons about phrenology, the pseudoscience of measuring bumps on the skull to diagnose mental traits, spiritualism and psychic research.
“The Fandango as a De Colonial Tool” is taught at Scripps College, offering Claremont McKenna students the chance to learn to dance the Fandango while “progressively deconstructing how we understand music and the role those social institutions have played in our conceptions of music and dance in society." A further module, also taught at Scripps, is simply called “Being French”, and is a study of Quebec's cultural identity. The course is taught entirely in French.