As a growing institution, UTSA takes pride in its ever-growing catalog of studies and areas of interest offered to students. With an assortment of undergraduate degrees, graduate programs and certifications, the university strives to remain an accessible and diverse option for students of all ages and backgrounds to pursue an education.
Nevertheless, the administration cannot be hasty in its pursuit of academic innovation and risk dropping the ball on other majors. That is precisely what the new Bachelor of Arts in Digital Media Influence will do.
Offered to both in-person and online students, this degree seeks to benefit from society’s far-reaching trend of influencers; people with online platforms that promote products, lifestyles and trends to their viewers. Although being an influencer is often regarded as an occupation that requires no formal education, many jobs can theoretically be performed without a degree that colleges provide schooling for. In creating a degree for it, UTSA is potentially drawing youths to college that perhaps would not have been interested in attending before.
Precisely because it is important to encourage atypical degree programs, it is indefensible that UTSA would choose to fund a degree plan for this influencer career instead of building a Master’s degree for its underdeveloped film program or a Bachelor’s degree for journalism. Rather than strengthening a discipline that already draws students to attend the university, UTSA is introducing a new program that does not manage to justify its existence.
Influencers often get their start by casually posting to their social media accounts, which requires no education or experience. Only once they go viral and gain a large following can they earn ad revenue and sponsorships to earn money. Upon seeing that money can be made from social media, influencers often drop out of school or quit their day jobs to pursue social media full-time. They tend to flaunt their wealth and luxurious lifestyles, revealing they earn more money from social media than regular people who work a nine-to-five. Famous influencer, Addison Rae dropped out of Louisiana State University to move to Los Angeles to pursue her career and has been very successful, with absolutely no need for a degree.
Going viral, the ultimate goal of an influencer, is a rare occurrence. Many people have posted on their platforms religiously for years and have had no luck. It is not something you can teach, much less have a degree in. And even if it was, there is no reason for people to pursue this degree when successful influencers have ended up selling lectures, seminars or guides on how they became successful at a much lower price point than college tuition. Rather than mimicking this fraudulent scheme, UTSA ought to be concerned with teaching its students how to avoid them – not replicate them.
To market this so-called “innovative’ degree, UTSA is revamping previously offered courses and shoving them into the degree plan in an attempt to hide how little value they add to students. UTSA already offers well-developed degrees in communication and marketing, both of which can be applied to fields beyond the realm of social media. Digital media used to be a concentration students could have as part of their communication degrees, which is way more recognized and versatile as a major. If the administration found this insufficient and wanted to provide the value of digital knowledge to a broader batch of students — which is commendable in this day and age — they could have made it a minor available to students of all disciplines.
Additionally, the degree description opening with the question “Are you chronically online?” as an enticement completely overlooks the negative implications that come with actually being chronically online. People who are chronically online are often like that because they struggle with socialization, social media addiction, anxiety, depression and many other mental health issues. Their perception of the world becomes warped to encompass the narrow scope that social media algorithms push to them, and they may become radicalized because of it. It reflects poorly on UTSA to promote this new degree in that manner when they use far more professional language to promote their other degrees.
The new Digital Media Influence degree is ill-conceived, unnecessary, and useless in comparison to already offered BAs. Truly, a wrong turn in UTSA’s quest for new frontiers in higher education.
