concentrating on video games? Colleges are under increasing pressure due to a new wave of degrees. Colleges are responding to economic trends by offering new majors that emphasize the debate over whether or not students are getting their money’s worth, such as degrees in AI or social media influence. Stephanie Gomez-Sanchez has loved video games since third grade. She didn’t realize that Mexican immigrants could have a career until Donald Trump won the election, when he famously called them “rapists.” She intends to enter the video game industry when she graduates from college this fall, at the age of 23. Her goal? to create characters that resemble her Mexican-American family in order to soften the debate about immigration in the United States. She stated, “We can all bond over a thing like gaming.”
Gomez-Sanchez attends the University of Delaware, which is one of many colleges and universities embracing new programs designed to encourage students to enter the multibillion-dollar industry of online gaming and esports (the school recently graduated its first cohort of approximately two dozen students). Majors like hers are part of a broader wave of less conventional, avant-garde majors, in specialties such as artificial intelligence, that are taking root in American higher education, as colleges grapple with changes in the economy and a shrinking pool of students.
For example, the first bachelor’s degree in “digital media influencing” will be offered this fall at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The new program’s director, associate professor Chad Mahood, claims that the major will assist students in better comprehending how to construct an online brand. He stated, “The influencer you just saw on TikTok, they have an intuitive sense of this, and that is why they are doing well.” “We will assist you if you don’t have that intuitive sense.” The trend underscores the distinct ways schools are responding to growing concerns over which degrees provide the best return on investment. That debate has only grown more contentious as college costs have skyrocketed, leaving many students with crippling loan debt, raising the stakes for schools to demonstrate that their graduates are better prepared for employment. Get the Diddy on Trial newsletter in your inbox.
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Variable delivery Your Message According to Donald Hossler, a former vice chancellor of student enrollment services at Indiana University Bloomington, arguments regarding how much of a college education should be geared toward training for specific jobs have existed for as long as universities have existed. He stated, “I’m a big believer in the liberal arts, but universities do not have the ability to print money.” “They must be able to hire faculty to teach in those areas if enrollment interests are shifting. Money has to come from someplace.”
Read more: Which college degrees are best? how AI is interfering with the debate. Video game degrees take off
Phillip Penix-Tadsen, the chair of the game studies and esports program at the University of Delaware, enjoys video games just as much as his students do. But they weren’t what made him a college professor; he has a doctorate in Spanish and is an assistant professor in the language department.
His work changed when he started looking into the cultural ramifications of online gaming. This was a passion that he and other university professors first shared casually, and they regularly met to talk about research on the topic. In 2016, he published the book “Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America.” By 2019, administrators had accepted the new bachelor’s degree concept. “It was like there had been a cultural change,” he said. Esports were well-known to all university members. That seemed to be kind of a buzzword.”
Over the past decade, organized competitive video gaming has become more common on college campuses, serving as a useful recruitment tool for universities and enticing gifts from rich donors. As the esports market expanded, college degrees geared toward the sector have grown, too. Video game design is one of the most popular majors at Rider University, a small private college in New Jersey. Last year it enrolled roughly 100 students and had three full-time faculty.
Wil Lindsay, Rider’s director of the degree program, stated, “It’s such a huge industry right now.” “The business industry fluctuates. But a lot of what we teach is transferable to other areas.”
Read more: Why watch other people play video games? What you need to know about esports
A tale of two professors
Lisa Di Bartolomeo, like the Delaware professor who started the game studies program, was raised in a traditional academic environment. She worked at a public university for many years. She, too, taught foreign language and culture.
But she was laid off when her school, West Virginia University, underwent a controversial “academic transformation” this year, cutting hundreds of jobs at the direction of administrators. She ultimately abandoned all further education. She is currently employed by an environmental organization that works to preserve and safeguard the state’s rivers. The school’s president, Gordon Gee, and other administrators pledged to “create a more focused academic portfolio aligned with student demand, career opportunities, and market trends” in the face of millions in financial losses. The process, they wrote in an open letter to West Virginians last September, would “strategically position the University for greater success and relevancy in the future.”
Art history, biometric systems engineering, and a few foreign languages were among the bachelor’s degrees that were being eliminated. According to Bartolomeo, the university launched a new major in esports two months after that letter was sent out, which irritated some of the faculty members who were fired. She stated, “We have a physical reaction to it whenever any of us hears esports brought up.” WVU spokesperson April Kaull stated that graduates of the new esports major will be prepared to work in a multibillion-dollar industry. She stated that data drove the decision to reorganize the department of foreign languages. She noted that the university still offers courses in Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic.
The situation in West Virginia exemplifies the human cost of some of the more contentious approaches universities have taken to increase enrollment by offering degrees that some believe to be more valuable to the economy. The “enrollment cliff,” as college officials ominously refer to it, will significantly reduce the number of high school graduates in the United States over the next ten years, making those choices even more difficult and frequent. Fewer students will mean schools bring in less tuition revenue, as well as steeper competition for the subset of young people who decide a college degree is worth the high price.
Shalin Jyotishi, a researcher at the progressive think tank New America who studies the future of jobs, stated that in order for educational institutions to maintain their appeal, they must adapt to changing requirements in the workplace. Yet change comes with risks.
“There are very real hype traps with these technology cycles,” he said. “There’s a risk of colleges skating too quickly to where the puck is going, and the puck moving in a different direction.”
The former professor at West Virginia University hesitated to assert that one degree is more valuable than another. Colleges are supposed to be places where students study more than just one thing, she said, and administrators wringing their hands about what the future holds should remember that.
“Part of the purpose of college is having all of those things available to our students,” she said.
Zachary Schermele covers education and breaking news for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. @ZachSchermele is his Twitter handle.
