Colleges are training the next generation of content creators

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The hot new thing to study in college is content creation. An increasing number of schools are offering classes and even majors and minors in the art of influencing.

Arkansas Tech University launched their digital content creation degree about three years ago. And Charlie Randall is a senior in that program, where he's also pursuing a double major in theater. He wants to use the degrees to break into voice acting.

SPEAKER_4 (1:51)

Al-Junon, what are you doing here?

Charlie Randall (1:53)

I don't understand. I can give a higher pitch. I'm a scientist, Jace.

I love to learn science and I want you to know science. I want you to be safe here.

Megan McCarty Carino (2:04)

He hopes learning additional skills in content creation will help give him a boost.

Charlie Randall (2:09)

I know it's all about networking in the acting world, so I know content creation is huge for networking, so I love that.

Megan McCarty Carino (2:17)

So what does a degree in content creation actually look like? What kinds of classes do you take?

Charlie Randall (2:23)

My first class that was really like content creation was a class called Social Media Influencing.

It's a data-driven class that teaches you, like these videos that have people greeting their audience in the beginning, it shows that they have a more higher view count, or if one has a better thumbnail, they have a better clickability rate and everything. It's just a lot of these in-depth things about content creation, what works, what doesn't work.

Megan McCarty Carino (2:48)

This is a relatively new field of study. Up till now, most people have just kind of been figuring it out on their own. So why take this as a college program?

Charlie Randall (2:59)

I think that if you want to get into content creation, and you are too afraid to or you don't know anything about it, but you still want to have some kind of degree in life just so you can have something that sets you in stone, I think digital content creation is for those people. It makes you do it. It makes you put content out there.

Megan McCarty Carino (3:19)

So you were already sort of locked in on like theater and filmmaking, but is there anything about the content creation part that's been challenging or surprising to you?

Charlie Randall (3:31)

Certain rules, I don't think it's necessary all the time. I think they're good for if you want to succeed and if you want the fame, but that's not what I want. I don't like AI. I think it's good for some things, but not when it comes to creating things that are supposed to be made by us.

People use it for thumbnails. I just think like, well, I think I can make that myself. I think it'd be more creative and personal if I made it myself.

Megan McCarty Carino (3:56)

I mean, all art is at base a business when you get down to it, but there is a lot more talk about optimization and there's that direct metric that you get back when you're talking about content creation of the clicks and the engagement and that kind of thing where that can really take over the process, right?

Charlie Randall (4:17)

I think that helps. There's data that shows that a lot of big YouTubers are using AI, but that doesn't mean there's not other YouTubers who are succeeding just as well that are not using it. I mean, MrBeast is a big YouTuber. My professor loves MrBeast and he has a lot of thumbnails that are sometimes made by AI. It's like, oh, yeah, this is what these big people are doing. That's what's going to work.