As swifties enter their “academic era,” colleges are taking advantage of Taylor Swift’s growing popularity.
With colleges beginning to shift from the traditional lecture style classrooms, professors are coming up with more innovative ways to encourage student learning – one of which is Taylor Swift analysis courses.
Swift, 14 time Grammy award winner, is known for her powerful lyrics and noteworthy business skills. Her latest tour that celebrates her 11 studio albums, has grossed over $1 billion in revenue during its 149 shows that has reached five continents. Swift still has 15 more shows on her tour as it is officially over in Dec. 2024. According to Variety, The Eras Tour sold over 4.35 million tickets just from Nov. 2022 to Nov. 2023 alone.
Over the past 18 years, Swift has made her mark through her controversial, dramatic actions which has paved the way for aspiring artists. For example, upon releasing her album “Reputation,” Swift swiped her social media accounts in anticipation. Now, it is not unheard of for artists to do the same when releasing new material. Swift is also known for dropping “easter eggs” into her songs, videos and social media posts to entertain fans by hinting at new content.
Most recently, Swift started rerecording and rereleasing old albums as Scooter Braun, CEO of Hybe Corporation, sold her music masters to Shamrock Holding, a private equity firm, for $405 million without notifying Swift. Each new release features a set number of new songs to encourage fans to switch to listening to the new albums instead.
Her influence on the music industry has prompted almost twenty colleges to offer courses based around the theme of “swiftology.” These courses range from literature to economics.
This phenomenon began in the winter of 2023 when Stanford University introduced a student-led “All Too Well” analysis course. The Italic arts program studied each line of the ten-minute song, as a literature course would analyze a poem.
Some other universities introducing these Swift-inspired classes include; The University of Texas, The University of Florida, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, as explained by Billboard.
The majority of the courses are analysis courses of her lyrics, albums by era and social impact on culture. For the fall semester of 2024, ten colleges – public, private and ivy – are running Swift-inspired classes that follow the themes of gender studies, cultural studies, entrepreneurship, English, and philosophy.
With her impressive resume, it is no wonder why millions of people want to follow in Swift’s footsteps and want to study her actions. In Swift’s 2022 New York University commencement speech, Swift mentioned she never had a normal college experience. Perhaps, her place in the classroom was never meant to be a student, but rather the inspiration for college studies.