Stephanie Gomez-Sanchez has loved video games since third grade. It wasn't until the election of Donald Trump, who famously referred to Mexican immigrants as " rapists ," that she saw a potential career in them.
After the 23-year-old graduates from college this fall, she plans to go into the video game industry. Her goal? To soften the immigration debate in the U.S. by creating characters that look like her Mexican-American family.
“We can all bond over a thing like gaming,” she said.
The University of Delaware, where Gomez-Sanchez is a student, is one of many colleges and universities embracing new programs tailored to pushing students into the multibillion-dollar field of online gaming and esports (the school just graduated its first cohort of about 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.
The University of Texas at San Antonio, for instance, is offering a bachelor’s degree in “digital media influencing” for the first time this fall. Chad Mahood, an associate professor at the school who oversees the new program, said the major will help students better understand how to build an online brand.
“That influencer that you just saw on TikTok, they have an intuitive sense of this, and that’s why they’re doing well,” he said. “If you don’t have that intuitive sense, we will help you.”
The trend underscores the distinct ways schools are responding to growing concerns over which degrees provide the best return on investment . As college costs soared to new heights in recent years, saddling many students with crippling loan debt, that discourse has only become increasingly fraught, raising the stakes for schools to prove their degrees leave students better prepared and employable.
Arguments over how much of a college education should be geared toward training for specific jobs have existed as long as universities have been around, said Donald Hossler, a former vice chancellor of student enrollment services at Indiana University Bloomington.
“I’m a big believer in the liberal arts, but universities don’t get to print money,” he said. “If enrollment interests are shifting, they have to be able to hire faculty to teach in those areas. Money has to come from someplace.”
Read more: Which college degrees are best? How AI is throwing a wrench in 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 shifted when he began investigating the cultural implications of online gaming – a passion he and other professors at the university first shared informally, meeting regularly to discuss research on the subject. In 2016, he published the book “Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America.” By 2019, administrators had warmed up to the idea of a new bachelor’s degree.
“It was like there had been a cultural change,” he said. “Every university member had heard of esports. 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. At Rider University, a small private college in New Jersey, video game design is among the most popular majors. Last year it enrolled roughly 100 students and had three full-time faculty.
“It’s such a huge industry right now,” said Wil Lindsay, who oversees the degree program at Rider. “The industry goes up and down. 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
Just like the Delaware professor who launched the game studies program, Lisa Di Bartolomeo came from a traditional academic background. 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 ended up leaving higher education altogether. She now works for an environmental organization that conserves and protects the state’s rivers.
Facing millions in financial losses, the school’s president, Gordon Gee, and other administrators vowed to “create a more focused academic portfolio aligned with student demand, career opportunities and market trends.” 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.”
Among the bachelor’s degrees on the chopping block were certain foreign languages, art history and biometric systems engineering. Two months after that letter went out, the university launched a new major in esports – a sore subject among some of the faculty members who were let go, Bartolomeo said.
“Anytime any of us hears esports brought up, we have a physical reaction to it,” she said.
April Kaull, a spokesperson for WVU, said the new esports major will prepare graduates to work in a multibillion-dollar industry. The decision to reorganize the foreign language department was data-driven, she said. She noted that the university still offers courses in Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic.
The situation in West Virginia demonstrates the human cost of some of the more controversial strategies universities have taken to attract more students by offering degrees some perceive as more economically valuable.
Those choices are only going to get harder and more frequent: Declining birth rates in the U.S. will significantly reduce the number of high school graduates in the next decade, a phenomenon that college officials ominously refer to as the “enrollment cliff.” 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.
To keep degrees attractive, schools have to adapt to evolving needs in the workforce, said Shalin Jyotishi, a researcher who studies the future of jobs at the progressive think tank New America. 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.”
Bartolomeo, the former West Virginia University professor, hesitated to say that any one degree has more explicit value 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. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele .
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Majoring in video games? A new wave of degrees underscores the pressures on colleges
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