Is a BA in Multimedia Just Another Throwaway Art Degree? What Parents Should Know
Last month, I was folding mismatched socks at my kitchen island after Sunday dinner when my 19-year-old niece Lila slid her paper college acceptance across the counter, grinning. She’d gotten into the in-state public university’s BA in Multimedia program, her first choice. My brother Mike, Lila’s dad and an accountant who’s always preferred plain spreadsheets to graphic-embellished spreadsheets, leaned back in his chair and asked the question I hear from at least three parents a month in my job as a high school guidance counselor: “Isn’t this just the degree colleges throw together to check a box for art courses? It’s not like a real degree, right?”
Lila has been editing highlight reels for her town’s youth soccer league for free since she was 16, designs adoption flyers for the local animal shelter, and cuts TikTok skits for her high school theater group. She’s turned down small payments from happy clients for years because she just enjoys solving the creative problems that come with the work, so when she said she wanted to study it full time, Mike’s first reaction was skepticism. He went to the same university 25 years ago, remembers when administration added a handful of unstructured art electives to boost enrollment back then, and assumed this was just a bigger, fancier version of that—an add-on to make the college look more inclusive, not a serious course of study.
I agreed to go to new student orientation with Lila last week, since Mike had a busy tax extension deadline, and I wanted to see the program for myself. What I saw surprised even me, who works with college programs every day. The program director started the session by putting up a list of local community and industry partners: the city convention center, the regional children’s museum, three mid-sized marketing firms, even the university’s own athletics and admissions departments. All of them take program interns every semester, and most hire two or three full-time grads a year. A senior who spoke at the orientation said she’d started working 10 hours a week in the university’s marketing office as a freshman through the program’s work placement board, and had a full-time job offer doing social media content and graphic design starting the week after graduation, for $54,000 a year with benefits.
I’m not going to pretend every BA in Multimedia is a rigorous, useful degree. I’ve seen small, for-profit colleges and even some small non-profit colleges slap the degree together by grabbing a couple introductory drawing classes from the art department, a couple public speaking classes from communications, and calling it a day. Those are exactly the box-checking programs skeptics worry about—meant to draw in creative kids who don’t want a traditional fine art degree, just to boost tuition revenue. No internship requirements, no capstone project, no connections to local employers. Those degrees are about as useful as a general studies degree with no clear focus, and I tell parents that straight.
But the good programs? They’re just as rigorous as any other BA. Lila’s posted 4-year plan requires 42 credit hours of core multimedia classes: that’s intro to UI design, professional video editing, interactive content creation, accessible web design, basic coding for content creators, and a semester-long capstone project where she has to build a full multimedia portfolio for a real external client. That’s more core credit hours than the BA in communications at the same school requires, and on par with the BA in psychology. It’s not just art class for students who can’t handle harder majors; it’s a mix of creative problem solving and technical skill building, just like any other applied degree.
When parents ask me how to tell the difference between a real program and a box-checking one, I tell them three quick things they can do in 10 minutes online. First, pull up the public 4-year course plan. If more than half of the required classes for the degree are general electives with no connection to multimedia or digital creative work, that’s a red flag. If it has at least 30 core credit hours of focused skill classes, that’s a good start. Second, check if an internship is required to graduate. If the program doesn’t mandate at least one semester of supervised work experience with an external client, it’s probably not serious. The entire field is hands-on, so any good program will make you get real experience before you leave. Third, look for a recent job placement report. If the program doesn’t publish one, or most grads are working in fields unrelated to multimedia, that’s a bad sign. Good programs are proud of their placements and will post that information front and center.
After orientation, I sent Mike the program’s job placement report and Lila’s core course list. He sat down at his kitchen table that night and went through it line by line, and admitted he’d been wrong to assume it was all fluff. Last week, he asked Lila to edit a short promotional video for his firm’s new small business accounting service, and paid her $200 for it. He still teases her sometimes about spending hours “tweaking clip art” instead of studying, but he’s stopped calling it a fake degree.
Lila moves into her dorm next month, and we don’t know how her degree will turn out. She might change her major after a semester, she might graduate and get a job she loves, or she’ll go to grad school for something else entirely. That’s the case with any degree, isn’t it? A BA in multimedia isn’t inherently a throwaway art add-on, and it isn’t inherently a golden ticket. It’s just a degree, like any other—what you get out of it depends just as much on the program you pick and the work you put in as it does any other major out there. For now, Lila’s just excited to spend four years learning more about the work she already loves doing for free, and that’s more than a lot of incoming college students can say.
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