Is a BA in Multimedia a Real Degree? What Parents Should Know
Last October, I sat across from my daughter Lila at our scratched kitchen table, sorting through a stack of college brochures that smelled like glossy printer ink and fall campus tour rain. A half-eaten peanut butter granola bar sat next to her elbow, and a coffee ring from my morning mug blotted the corner of the in-state public university’s pamphlet. When she tapped the course catalog entry for BA Multimedia and said “This is the one I want to apply to,” my first thought was exactly the question I’d seen a hundred other parents asking in college planning Facebook groups: is this just another fluff art degree colleges add to check their “modern arts” box? Is it even the same as any other four-year degree?
Then my brother Jake, who works in admissions at a different state school 45 minutes away, wandered in with a six-pack he’d picked up on his drive over, and heard us talking it through. I said out loud what I was thinking: “It’s a BA, same as English or history, right? Or did they just throw this together so they can say they have art offerings for kids who don’t want traditional studio art?”
Jake pulled out a chair, popped open an IPA, and leaned in. He’d been on the committee that approved his school’s BA Multimedia program eight years earlier, so he had more context than any random blog post I’d scrolled through at 10 p.m. He said the idea that all multimedia degrees are just checkbox art programs isn’t totally wrong—some smaller schools do exactly that. A few years back, he saw a tiny liberal arts college add a multimedia degree with only two full-time faculty, and most of the classes were just repackaged intro drawing and Communications 101. They did it because enrollment was dropping in their traditional fine art program, and they wanted a catchier name to bring in more tuition money. It existed just to check a box for more art course offerings, nothing more.
But that’s not the case for most programs that have been around for more than a couple of years, he said. At his school, they didn’t add it to hit an art quota. They added it because every year, local employers—marketing agencies, small game development studios, non-profits that make educational content, even the local public school district that needs people to create training videos and social media content—would come to career fairs and ask if they had any grads who could both design a graphic and edit a video and write a clear caption for it. The fine art grads were great at creative work, but most didn’t have the technical or communication skills for those day-to-day roles. Communications grads could write, but couldn’t edit video or design original assets. So the program was built to fill that gap, not just add another art course line to the course catalog.
We pulled up the curriculum for the program Lila was looking at on my laptop, right there at the table. It added up the same as every other BA at that school: 120 total credits for graduation, general education requirements identical to every other major, same regional accreditation. 36 credits for the multimedia major, which split pretty evenly between creative studio classes (digital drawing, narrative film production) technical classes (intro to coding for interactive media, motion graphics design, user experience basics) and communications classes (content strategy, media ethics). It also required a 12-credit internship, which is more than most traditional BA majors require for graduation. That didn’t look like a checkbox program to me.
Over the next couple of weeks, I did a little digging of my own, just to be sure. I emailed the department advisor at the school Lila wanted, and asked if she could connect me to a recent grad who’d be willing to chat for 10 minutes on the phone. A week later, I talked to Mia, who graduated two years ago. She told me she’d turned down a spot in a general communications program to do multimedia, and she’d had three job offers before she finished her last semester. She now works as a content creator for a regional children’s hospital, making short social media videos and patient education materials. She said her degree was just as rigorous as any other BA she considered, and it gave her specific skills she could use right after graduation.
That’s when I sorted through what I’d learned, what other parents can do if their kid brings up a BA Multimedia. First, it’s not automatically a fluff degree, and it counts as a fully accredited four-year BA same as any other major for any job or graduate school that requires a bachelor’s. It’s different from a traditional fine art degree, in that it’s usually built for applied industry work instead of gallery or fine art careers, but that doesn’t make it less of a degree. Second, the bad checkbox programs are easy to spot if you spend 20 minutes digging. Pull up the full curriculum online: if most of the major classes are repackaged general art or communications classes, and there’s no required internship or technical component, that’s probably the checkbox program people warn you about. If the program has full-time faculty who currently work in the multimedia industry, and lists specific internship partners with local companies, that’s a real degree built for actual work.
Third, you don’t have to take the department’s marketing materials at face value. Shoot a quick message to the alumni office, ask for a recent grad to answer a couple of questions. Most are happy to chat for 10 minutes about what they got out of the program. Lila ended up applying to three different multimedia programs, and we did this check for all three. One checked out perfectly, one was clearly underfunded and put together quickly, so she crossed it off her list right away.
Right now, she’s waiting for acceptance letters, and we still don’t know exactly where she’ll end up. I still catch myself thinking sometimes about how when I was her age, the only art degrees people talked about were fine art or music, and anything new felt like it might not be “real.” But what I’ve learned is that it’s not the name of the degree that makes it a checkbox or a legitimate program. It’s what the college puts into it, and what your kid plans to do with it. We’re still waiting, but doing that little bit of digging took most of the uncertainty out of the process for both of us.
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