College Fellows: Inaugural Year for a Game-changing Program
Urban Arts teaches video game design as a pathway to college and career. Plus, we offer a free College Access program, boosting futures in STEM and the arts. Our pilot College Fellows program hired five alumni as advisors, providing paid positions with pre-professional training, a schedule that works for them, and a resume building block.
For young people, the most authentic guides are those who have just walked the walk, which is why we invest in our alumni with paid, purpose-driven opportunities to support the next generation. Through the College Fellows program, current college students bring their real-world experience, empathy, and hard-earned knowledge back to current high school seniors, offering weekly near-peer mentorship across applications, essays, financial aid, and everything in between. It works. 100% of Urban Arts seniors are accepted to college and they’ve earned $71M in scholarships since 2020.
Within the 31 students served in the Fellows program, they earned $8.4M in aid.
Impact Report: ALUMNI 2026. We hire our most powerful advocates.
WHY GAME DESIGN?
At Urban Arts, students don’t just play games—they create them. As the nation’s premier nonprofit teaching video game design, we prepare young people for college and career by blending coding, 3D modeling, animation, and storytelling with the essential workforce skills of collaboration, leadership, and design-thinking. Students learn to build original games from the ground up, pitch their ideas, and develop portfolios that colleges and employers notice.
Game design fuels creativity while building critical problem-solving and technical expertise for a $300B industry and beyond. The results speak for themselves: Urban Arts students have earned over $46M in scholarships and launched careers at Lucasfilm, Unity, Amazon, Salesforce, and more. With Urban Arts, creativity isn’t just encouraged—it’s the pathway to the future.