Places that offer honours degrees such as 'Waste Management and Dance', 'Third World Development and Pop Music', 'Equestrian Psychology', 'Australian Studies' and 'Criminology and Pop Music Production' really want to be the subject of a bit of waste management themselves I reckon.
Quango opposes crackdown on degrees - Telegraph
But surely you know that the Uni doesn't offer a degree in "Waste Management and Dance" or "Third World Development and Pop Music". These are all joint honours choices - 2 entirely separate "degree level" courses - like someone choosing to do say "Maths" and "Music" as two Highers at school.
"Australian Studies" is the only one of the courses listed that would be a genuine single choice - however, again it is basically a joint honours type course because the student will be made to choose at least two courses in different fields that relate to Australia - so for example Australian History and Australian Literature, or Australian Politics and Environmental Issues Linked to Australia (study of the coral reef perhaps), or you could choose Australian Literature and Australian Musical History if the uni had a professor really into Nick Cave or The Go-Betweens.
In the USA the idea of joint honours courses is far more common but they tend to split it into a Major course and a minor course - so you'd get a degree that says you have a Major in Waste Management and a Minor in Dance - making it pretty clear to potential employers where your "deeper" area of knowledge is.
Personally I don't think it matters much what most degrees are in - the point of them is to prove you can study, gather evidence, produce work that makes it clear you can sift through data and make a worthwhile report or piece of work. Obviously some degrees are much more vocationally important - doctors, vets, lawyers etc but really does it make any difference if those graduate trainees at some office based company did their dissertations on Australian History, Literature of the 19th century, Psychology of Football fans or Waste Management techniques in rural England?
What
IS important is that the standard of work they do on these courses are high enough to warrant a degree - that is surely the big issue and having seen work produced at Edinburgh University in traditional courses I don't think that issue is exclusive to the "way out" there courses.
