Arizona State University is now offering a bachelor's degree in content creation — a four-year credential to teach young Americans how to be influencers, at a school where GI Bill benefits won't even cover the tuition.

This is the logical endpoint of a university system that has abandoned education in favor of chasing trends. ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication — named for a man who reported on wars and presidencies — will now train students in "personal branding" and "monetizing your video channel." The program description doesn't mince words: "Do you dream of monetizing your video channel or making social media your career?" That's not a curriculum. That's a sales pitch.

In-state tuition at ASU runs $12,177 per year, meaning a four-year influencer degree runs nearly $50,000 before room and board. GI Bill benefits do not currently apply to the degree, according to the Quincy Patriot Ledger. Veterans can't use their earned benefits to study this — but 18-year-olds can sign the loan paperwork. The degree includes photography trips to Scotland and social media study in Tokyo. Nothing says "content creation" like a vacation on student debt.

ASU isn't alone. St. Bonaventure University in New York announced its own Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation in December 2025, with its first class arriving fall 2026. The credential is spreading.

The university points to the creator economy's $500 billion global valuation and projected 23% annual growth through 2030. Full-time digital creator jobs surged from 200,000 in 2020 to 1.5 million in 2024, per an April 2025 report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Harvard Business School. Those numbers sound impressive until you read the fine print: influencer incomes range from zero to "stratospheric." ASU's own cited data concedes as much. The degree's listed career paths — communications specialist, marketing associate, PR manager — are the same jobs any standard communications degree already unlocks.

Meanwhile, the tech infrastructure underpinning this creator economy is quietly consuming its users. This week, a solo game developer reported that Google's AI scraped the name of an unannounced character straight from their private Google Docs and served it to a player. The developer, Klub Kofta Studio, had never shared the name publicly. As Polygon reported, Google automatically opts users into sharing their Google Drive data to train AI models — a setting buried in terms of service. "It's what companies do. Quietly opt all your stuff into AI while trying to avoid announcing it, then bury an option to opt out," one Reddit commenter wrote. Others raised the obvious next question: if private documents are in the training data, can you dox people by asking the AI specific questions?

So here is the bargain: go into debt to learn how to build your personal brand on platforms that are already harvesting your private data to train their machines. The university collects tuition. The platforms collect your content and your information. The student collects a piece of paper and a monthly loan payment.

The founders built colleges to produce citizens capable of self-government. ASU is producing influencers for an algorithm. The question isn't whether these degrees will spread — they will. The question is who's left holding the bag when the bubble pops.