Esports is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, and higher education is paying attention. Earlier this year, Becker College introduced an Esports Management degree, and now the school is providing academic scholarships for 2019’s inaugural four-year Esports Management class, according to a press release obtained by GameDaily.biz.
Becker College’s Bachelor of Science in Esports Management degree teaches students the skills they need to work in the esports industry, including planning esports events, running streaming equipment, creating a business plan for a professional team, and managing a team’s finances. The degree also looks at contemporary esports games, the culture behind the field, and why companies are interested in marketing deals and sponsorships in the esports industry.
“We are focused on providing students with practical, hands-on learning and an entrepreneurial outlook, to best prepare them for the future of work in the booming esports industry,” Becker College’s Dean of the School of Design and Technology, Alan Ritacco, said in a press release obtained by GameDaily.biz.
Becker College prides itself as the only college in the U.S. to offer an Esports Management degree—as well as the only one to offer academic scholarships in Esports Management. Planning behind the four-year degree began a year ago after Ritacco pitched the idea to the school’s business faculty. Becker College already had a varsity esports team, an esports club, a sports management degree, and a strong game design program, so creating an Esports Management degree simply made sense.
“We’ve integrated what we do in our business department… and created about 12 courses that are Esports Management-specific,” Ritacco told GameDaily.biz. “Our first course has been launched, it started in the fall, and we have folks who are in the industry, experts in esports, teaching these courses.”
Ritacco stressed that the initial class, titled “Introduction to Esports Management,” remains phenomenally. Students regularly stay after class to talk to faculty members, and zero students have dropped out of the class since it began in September.
“We set up this course about 10 days before classes started, and the next day we had 16 students enroll,” Ritacco explained. “It just doesn’t happen.”
Esports is no longer a hobbyist field, but rather something prospective students “can make a career out of” and the world can “grow the economy around,” Ritacco told GameDaily.biz. For that reason, Esports Management is built around fostering well-rounded entrepreneurs that can learn new skills, collaborate effectively with others, and become an empathetic person in their field.
“These students are going to be entrepreneurs, so using empathy and reading the tea leaves to be an entrepreneur is going to be so important,” Ritacco said. “Think about the fantastic opportunities, what a great time to be an 18-year-old.”
Becker College is a private college located in Worcester and Leicester, Massachusetts. The school hosts nearly 1,800 students and is regularly praised for its game design studies, which The Princeton Review ranks as the fourth best in the world. Interested students can learn more about Becker’s Esports Management degree by visiting the college’s official website.
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