It’s time to take TikTok degrees seriously

Somewhere right now, a 24-year-old is filming himself waking at 4.57am to “attack the day”, narrating a cold plunge to a phone propped on a $12 tripod. Someone else is inhaling 9,000 calories of petrol-station food into a ring light.

A third is standing in a Target car park, proclaiming that you are the CEO of your own life with the grave tonality of a wartime general.

This is the creator economy. And yes, it can look unbelievably stupid.

So when Arizona State University (ASU) recently announced a bachelor’s degree in content creation – explicitly designed to prepare students to become “influencers” – the sneering was instant and understandable.

ASU practically invited it with a course called “How to Become an Influencer” and a promise that students would “master the art and science of digital influence”.

Roll your eyes. Laugh. It’s fine. But consider the possibility that ASU has done something the rest of higher education may feel too dignified to do: it looked at what the present economy rewards and built a major around it.

That may be one of the most honest things a university could do in the artificial intelligence era.

The actual joke is colleges running the old advising playbook, feeding 18-year-olds fossilised chestnuts such as: “Just major in finance. It’s safe.”

Except it isn’t.

Recent research has undermined ideas about “safe” occupations. Anthropic ranks computer programmers and financial analysts among the occupations most exposed to AI. Microsoft finds high AI applicability across knowledge work, while the World Economic Forum places graphic designers just outside the 10 fastest-declining jobs. These are not low-wage occupations. They are the well-paid, highly educated professions we have spent decades advising young people to pursue.

Finance, computer science and graphic design used to offer graduates a reliable bottom rung: the analyst who prepares the financial forecast, the associate who drafts the memo, the junior developer who writes the boilerplate. Yet that starting rung is precisely where AI is getting better, faster and cheaper.

And what are the serious people in higher education doing? Too often, doubling down. What passes for curricular innovation often consists of compressing familiar degrees and getting students to supposedly safe career tracks faster. But speed is not reinvention. A shorter runway does not help if the destination is moving.

Now examine what ASU is actually teaching. Its curriculum includes audience analytics, media law, communication ethics, media writing, production, entrepreneurship, copyright and data-driven decision-making. Strip away the admittedly silly name, and the major resembles applied marketing combined with media, business and analytics – taught against a live target.

While the word influencer conjures someone mugging for a camera, successful creators often operate more like small-business owners. They manage content strategy, partnerships, contracts, audience growth, intellectual property and multiple revenue streams. The good ones are not necessarily the people with the brightest ring lights or the most aggressively whitened teeth. They are solopreneurs capable of operating one-person media companies.

Employers increasingly seek this same Swiss Army knife of a candidate: someone who can develop a strategy, shoot and edit video, interpret analytics, use AI tools, build a community and translate business goals into content suited to several platforms. Responsibilities once divided among a team now appear together in a single job description.

None of those skills is trapped inside the word “influencer”. A student who can build and hold an audience might become a marketer, communications director, community manager, agency founder or independent creator.

AI has made content nearly free. We can generate effectively infinite text, images, audio and video on demand. But producing content and communicating something that lands are not the same achievement. As our screens fill with machine-made sameness, judgement, taste, credibility and trust become more valuable.

You can prompt a model to write a flawless business plan. You cannot simply prompt 40,000 strangers to believe you.

ASU’s programme is defensible in principle, which is different from saying that it will automatically be good. Its success depends on what the curriculum treats as permanent. A degree built around today’s platforms will become obsolete when those platforms change. One built around storytelling, audience psychology, ethics, strategy, adaptability and critical judgement may survive whatever replaces TikTok.

What ASU has identified may be less a creator economy than a communication economy. Engineers, physicians, non-profit leaders, professors, entrepreneurs and financial advisers increasingly need to explain ideas, establish credibility and earn attention online. Influence, in this broader sense, is not the ability to persuade strangers to take cold plunges. It is the ability to make people pay attention to your work and trust your judgement.

Every career-oriented major should now answer the questions ASU’s programme at least attempts to confront: What will students build, test, revise and demonstrate? What will they know how to do once AI can produce the acceptable first draft? Which abilities will survive when the software improves or the job changes its name?

Here is the honest answer nobody in a bow tie wants to give: there is no safe major any more. There are only more or less durable abilities – judgement, adaptability, the nerve to build something real and the ability to command human attention for a reason.

ASU is not telling every student to become the ring-light guy. But when a state university looks unblushingly at an AI-transformed economy and decides that human attention and trust are worth teaching, it has not lost its mind. It may be the only institution in the room paying attention.

So laugh at the influencer major all you want. But ASU’s new programme isn’t the punchline.

The punchline is that we still call the traditional majors safe.

Matthew Brophy is associate professor of philosophy at High Point University in North Carolina.