‘Party planning’ is the new basket weaving

Regarding the Las Vegas Sun’s May 10 story headlined “The academics of party planning”:

When I was in school at the University of Michigan the joke around campus was that the varsity athletes could always take “basket weaving” to improve their grade-point averages.

Now I find that UNLV offers an actual course called “Nightclub Management,” a course in “party planning” for which the final exam is interviewing nearly nude, beautiful women lounging around a hotel swimming pool.

I am sure that an A in this course counts toward a grade-point average just as much as an A in such mundane courses as physics, the classics (literature), chemistry, political science, mathematics, etc.

If this is the way in which UNLV believes it can achieve the status of a “world-class university,” then higher education is doomed. I would be interested to know how much taxpayer money directly or indirectly goes to support party planning.