Why Influencer U Is Unlikely to Pay Off | American Enterprise Institute

Arizona State University (ASU) has launched a bachelor’s degree in content creation. Yes, really. According to ASU, the new program “prepares you to become an influencer and strategic storyteller who thrives in the rapidly evolving creator economy.” With more than half of Gen Z respondents telling one pollster they would become influencers if given the opportunity, it could be a stroke of brilliance as a marketing strategy for ASU.

However, for the students paying ASU’s tuition and fees—which run to $15,000 per year for Arizona residents and $39,000 for others—that bachelor’s degree in content creation might not live up to students’ expectations. While good data on student outcomes for influencer degrees don’t yet exist, we have data on the outcomes for comparable degrees—and it’s not encouraging.

Economists John Conlon and Dev Patel examined survey data about the expectations college freshmen held for their careers, and compared those expectations to the actual percentage of students who ended up working in their “dream” occupations. “Students greatly overestimate the likelihood that that majors lead to their representative jobs,” the authors write.

For instance, 63 percent of prospective art majors reported that they expected to be artists. But the authors found that only 17 percent of art majors actually end up working in an artistic career. Among prospective communications and journalism majors, 42 percent of first-year students expected to be writers or journalists. The actual share of majors who end up in that occupation is 4 percent.

For some passion degrees, especially in the arts, graduates who don’t end up working in their field have few good alternative job opportunities. For the majority of arts majors who do not end up working in an arts career, some of the most common alternative jobs include retail salesperson, customer service representative, and waiter or waitress—careers not exactly known for decent wages. Overall, median earnings for young arts majors are just $38,000, compared to $55,000 for recent college graduates with degrees in other fields.

Conlon and Patel find that for other fields, the proportion of prospective majors who expect to work in a certain occupation hews closer to the true share. Around 78 percent of education majors expect to be teachers, while the share of education majors who actually end up working as teachers is around 57 percent. Nursing majors expect to work in their field at a rate of 85 percent; the share who do is 60 percent. For business, the corresponding figures are 73 percent and 47 percent; for engineering, 71 percent and 42 percent.

There are still gaps between expectations and reality—that’s true for every major—but the concordance between what students pursue in college and where they end up working is much stronger for majors such as education, nursing, business, and engineering. Moreover, typical early-career salaries for most of these majors (education excepted) tend to be higher, which suggests that these students have decent backup job opportunities available even if they do not work in the job they initially expected.

By contrast, students face much longer odds of working in their preferred career in majors such as arts and communications. These just so happen to be the majors that correspond most closely with ASU’s new “content creation” degree.

Existing data also shows that an in-field degree is not the path that most workers take into other creative occupations. For instance, only 28 percent of young artists hold a bachelor’s degree in the arts, according to the American Community Survey. Twenty-nine percent of young artists hold a degree in another field, and 43 percent hold no bachelor’s degree at all.

We’ll have to wait several years for data on career outcomes at Influencer U, but I suspect that the degree’s results will be similar. Most students who pursue a bachelor’s degree in content creation are unlikely to become full-time content creators themselves. It may still be a good idea for aspiring content creators to earn a college degree—but there’s no reason that degree has to be in content creation. A degree in another field may offer better backup opportunities if social media fame doesn’t work out.

Just as students should be skeptical of influencing degrees, colleges should also remember that they don’t need to turn every passion project into a formal educational program with a potential six-figure price tag. ASU’s content creation program certainly got the nation’s attention. But aspiring Gen Z influencers should probably give it a pass for now.