University Gives Students Up to $15K in Scholarships for Rare Gaming Achievements

The University of Silicon Valley is turning heads for its unsocial assistance program, which awards thousands of dollars to students who tin beryllium their leet gaming skills.

Some colleges person esports programs, portion others connection crippled improvement courses. The University of Silicon Valley has a fewer of those, excessively — but they besides person a ‘Max Achievement Scholarship,’ which is turning heads crossed the net owed to its antithetic requirements.

More specifically, USV is awarding assistance wealth to students who are truly bully astatine games. A wide assortment of titles are connected offer, including MMORPGs similar Final Fantasy XIV and Old School Runescape, Roguelikes similar Hades and Risk of Rain 2, Sandbox games similar Minecraft, and galore more.

To gain the assistance cash, students indispensable beryllium they’ve earned circumstantial in-game achievements crossed 2 abstracted tiers: Mastery and Legendary. Mastery earns students up to $2,500 per term, portion Legendary nets them up to $5,000 per term, with each twelvemonth consisting of 3 terms.

For example, they tin taxable their accomplishment for Old School RuneScape by getting Max Cape (earned aft getting each 24 skills to level 99). In Final Fantasy XIV, players tin taxable for Legendary Tier by getting each 20 combat jobs and 8 crafter/gatherer jobs to level 100.

While this mightiness look similar an unusual means of fiscal assistance, USV argues this assistance rewards “the aforesaid qualities that thrust world excellence: disciplined practice, strategical problem-solving, and the pursuit of mastery beyond minimum requirements.”

“These are the aforesaid traits that specify our Polymathic Domains — including Systems Thinking & Engineering, Computational Fluency, and Agentic AI Collaboration. USV believes mastery is mastery — whether expressed done code, art, design, oregon virtual worlds,” the tract says.

While achievements crossed rather a fewer games are up for grabs, the University tells students not to interest if their rubric of prime isn’t listed connected the website; they tin inactive taxable it, arsenic agelong arsenic they see documentation of its rarity (specifically, a <5% completion rate), and an mentation of the mastery involved. The assistance committee reviews each applications connected a case-by-case basis.

This twelvemonth marks the debut of the Max Achievement Scholarship, which aims to reward 10 - 15 students successful the 2026 - 2027 world calendar. Expansion of the programme is taxable to alteration based connected the prime of applicants, arsenic good arsenic the program’s wide success.

This is acold from the archetypal clip a University has turned heads with antithetic world offerings; successful 2021, the University of Glasgow went viral for offering a doctrine people based connected The Simpsons titled, ‘D'Oh! The Simpsons Introduce Philosophy.’

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With 10 years of acquisition reporting connected games and entertainment, she’s got a storied inheritance successful the warring crippled community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her connected Twitter astatine @TheeMissGlaze.