Roehampton University has cracked the code that eluded economists for centuries: if you cannot teach them, pay them to play video games instead. The institution is now offering students £2,000 a year to compete in esports alongside their actual degrees, which is either a brilliant hedge against educational collapse or the most honest thing a university has done in decades.
The logic is flawless. Traditional education has become expensive, outcomes are murky, and employers increasingly do not care what you studied anyway. So why not skip the pretense? Just hand students cash to sit in a gaming chair for a few hours a week, slap “esports scholarship” on the brochure, and call it a pathway to professional gaming that will almost certainly not materialize.
To be fair, Roehampton is not entirely wrong. Esports is a real industry with real money in it—just not for the £2,000-a-year tier of competitive play. But that is the beauty of the scheme: students get paid to dream, universities get recruitment numbers that look dynamic, and nobody has to admit that higher education is now indistinguishable from a very expensive lottery ticket where the prize is debt and a degree nobody reads.
The real genius is the signal it sends. Universities are no longer even pretending that their value proposition is knowledge or skills. They are just competing for warm bodies and tuition money by offering the financial equivalent of a gaming PC and a pat on the back. It is not the collapse of education—it is education finally admitting what it has been doing all along: selling hope in bulk and calling it a degree.