Melbourne University Dreamlarge Ads

On a lazy Saturday one day I was watching TV with my family, getting ready for another episode of Funniest Home Video Shows, and then I saw an ad that asked "Do you see abundance?" and displayed a picture of dry land. It asked "Do you see peace?" and showed images of tanks being blown up. At the end it says, "We can" and then the Melbourne University logo showed up. I was quite impressed with this ad, so I checked out the website http://www.dreamlarge.edu.au/ and looked at the other ads in the Dreamlarge series. I especially liked the music, which was made by a student at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Melbourne University is starting an ambitious transition into US-style broad education. Some critics call it elitist because it will make the degrees longer and more expensive. Although Melbourne University is not up there with Harvard, Cambridge, or Oxford, the University of Melbourne is number one in Australia and its global rank in recent years has fluctuated between 19 to 22. Either way it is usually consistently in the global top 25.

In the US, most of the elite universities only offer two undergraduate degrees, Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science. If you want to do law, medicine, business, etcetera you have to study these in graduate school. In Australia it usually doesn't work like this. If you want to become a physician you get the MBBS undergraduate degree, if you want to become a lawyer you get the LLB, and so on. One extreme example of this is La Trobe University. With the Melbourne Model, the number of undergraduate degrees will drop from 96 to 6. However, La Trobe has over 200 undergraduate degrees. Normally, if you want to study, say, accounting, you study a Bachelor of Commerce and major in accounting. At La Trobe, each major is its own course. There is a Bachelor of Accounting, a Bachelor of Economics, and so forth. These changes are supposed to align Melbourne University with the best in Europe and America.