Why Colleges Are Offering Degrees in Video Games
By Movieguide® Contributor
With the cost of college on the rise, schools are beginning to offer more Gen Z-centric programs to allure incoming students.
Some of these programs include degrees in video game creation, esports or digital media influencing. While some may view these degrees as worthless, younger people realize that they provide them with a leg up in multibillion-dollar industries.
“That influencer you just saw on TikTok, they have an intuitive sense of [how to build an online brand], and that’s why they’re doing well,” said Chad Mahood, an associate professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, which is now offering degrees in digital media influencing. “If you don’t have that intuitive sense, we will help you.”
While these programs can prove to be a selling point for teens who might otherwise skip college, they come at a cost to less popular degrees that get placed on the chopping block. At West Virginia University, for example, new degrees in the video game industry were added, but the school cut multiple foreign language programs in the process, leading to hundreds of faculty members losing their jobs.
While many lament the loss of these less popular but more traditional programs and classes, others caution against these programs for fear that they are fads not worth restructuring universities around.
“There are very real hype traps with these technology cycles,” said Shalin Jyotishi, a researcher who studies the future of jobs. “There’s a risk of colleges skating too quickly to where the puck is going, and the puck moving in a different direction.”
Nonetheless, advocates for these new programs argue the skills learned in these classes can be applied to a variety of job sectors, allowing students to succeed even if the job industry shifts away from their degrees’ focus.
“The industry goes up and down. But a lot of what we teach is transferable to other areas,” said Wil Lindsay, the professor who oversees the video game design degree at Rider University in New Jersey.
Some schools have no choice but to take a chance on these degrees as they struggle to stay afloat in a world where many are choosing to forgo college due to rising costs.
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that the “overall college enrollment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds was lower in 2022 than a decade earlier in 2012 (39 vs. 41 percent).”
However, that trend is expected to reverse course as “total undergraduate enrollment is projected to increase by 9 percent (from 15.4 million to 16.8 million students) between 2021 and 2031.”
Providing degrees that students find relevant to their interests could help revitalize universities’ enrollment.
Movieguide® previously reported on college:
Colleges and universities are starting to offer degrees in AI as the technology becomes more and more prevalent in industries all over the world.
“Specialists in artificial intelligence have never been more important, in shorter supply or in greater demand by employers,” Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, said of their program, which was launched in 2018.
The University of Southern California has also established an AI program, with USC professor Yolanda Gil calling it “pioneering and forward-thinking.”
“With this program, we will empower business and organizational leaders to understand the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of AI technologies and to help them better understand the people they serve, predict trends and improve decision-making processes,” Gil continued.
Emma Twitmeyer, a rising junior at Penn, is one of many students who are pursuing a degree in AI. She changed her major and says there are “plenty” of others who are planning to do the same thing.
