Let us know your thoughts in the poll below
Would you go to university to learn how to become an influencer?
That’s the idea behind an influx of post-secondary programs around the world offering courses and degrees in content creation, teaching everything from on-camera presence to brand-development skills.
“Honestly, I feel like it could be a good idea,” said Julietta Almeida, a 16-year-old from Toronto, Ontario.
“And if you’re [already] good at being an influencer, might as well just get a degree for it,” she told CBC Kids News.
Fifteen-year-old Declan O’Sullivan, also from Toronto, thought it was “a little weird.”
“All the people big in content, I don’t think they have a master’s degree,” he said.
“For the cost of a university degree, I think you could get it in something else and still be successful in content creation.”
As some high school students begin college and university application season, CBC Kids News hit the streets of Toronto to find out what teens thought about getting a full-fludged degree in content creation.
Check out the video below to hear what they had to say, then keep reading to learn more about influencer degrees:
Degrees in content creation
In August, Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, announced a new bachelor’s degree in content creation, offered through its school of journalism and mass communication.
The program joins similar ones around the world in places like Ireland and Canada, where Ontario Tech University recently launched a similar master’s program, called Social Media Communication in Online Creators.
The programs say that they teach things like:
- Multimedia production (video, audio, graphic design, podcasting, editing).
- Developing a brand.
- Analytics, monetization and community-building.
- On-camera presence.
- Business, entrepreneurship and partnership know-how.
But is a degree necessary?
The idea is that these post-secondary programs can help foster the skills — both on camera and behind it — that go into content creation.
And that might make sense, as some experts say content creation is not as simple as just turning on a camera and trying the latest Starbucks drink.
“It is a time-consuming, labour-intensive job that often doesn’t pay well — at least in the beginning,” Brooke Erin Duffy, a communication professor at Cornell University in New York state, told the Associated Press.
“A lot of that gets concealed behind … this assumption that it’s a dream job,” she said.
But critics have questioned if those skills can be self-taught, especially considering the high price tag of a post-secondary degree.
The cost of completing the Ontario Tech program is set at nearly $16,000 in total. Tuition for the Arizona program would cost Canadian students nearly $50,000 per year, without scholarships.
But some say they would still be willing to pay for a degree.
Content creator and actor Sammy Cristerna, who graduated from Arizona State University this spring, said he would have definitely enrolled in the content creator program had it been available to him when he first applied to the university.
He said the program could have taught him important things like negotiating deals with brands and partners, growing an audience and monetizing.
Some of those skills can be self-taught, he told the Associated Press, but “it’s nice to have that formal education.”
That said, personality — one of the core attributes of a successful creator — is something that’s “hard to teach” in a classroom, he added.
So, what do you think?
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With files from The Associated Press
