• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 11, 2011

Remember the old adage, those who can't do, teach? YouTube seems to want us to keep this in mind in its latest project to enter a select couple of colleges with video training programs/promotions. Well, arguably, YouTube has always been in college. After all, who else on earth but college students have enough time to watch the billions of hours of horseplay and hijinks video that make YouTube famous. 'Dude, you gotta see this. Right in the nuts. Bam! That's gotta hurt. Any Amstel Light left?" 

No, seriously, YouTube really is coming to two colleges this summer to hold Creator Institutes that will train a generation raised on user-gen clips how to bump it up to the next level of professionalism. Starting in late May at both the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (LA) and Chicago's Columbia College Television department, a select few will come to learn about all aspects of personal video production. 

Apparently Google is underwriting this program and the students. Users will enter demo reels and applications. According to the fine print at the dedicated site, Goggle will give winning applicants tuition, room, board and travel to one of these two campuses. The new media curriculum will cover story arcing, production, lighting, managing actors, etc. The aim of the program is to produce for each student a customized personal brand channel -- and of course more content for YouTube. The students will be required to video-blog  their experience. So it sounds as if YouTube is going to turn this into a kind of online reality show. The students will produce a final piece of work that will be promoted on YouTube.   

The demo videos and applications will first be reviewed by a team of judges, who will select a group of 500 top-scoring video submissions that YouTube  users will vote on to get 50 finalists for each school. Finally,  each school will judge the finalists to award 10 people with entrance to the program.    

YouTube says that the Creator Institute is part of its next-gen partner development program aimed at expanding and evolving the people who are providing the video Goliath with its real fuel, content. The company says that the number of partners now making over $1,000 a month from their YouTube videos is up 300% this year alone,  and now number in the hundreds. "But frankly, 'hundreds' making a living off of YouTube isn't enough," Tom Pickett, Director of Global Content Operation and YouTube Next, writes on the blog. "We know we can and should do more to help our partners grow."

As an interesting aside, Pickett also mentions the recently acquired Next New Networks in his post and puts an interesting spin on it. "Within YouTube, Next New Networks will be a laboratory for experimentation and innovation with the team working in a hands-on way with a wide variety of content partners and emerging talent to help them succeed on YouTube," he writes. "We are thrilled with the new capability the team brings and the positive impact it will have making our YouTube partners more successful."

As if to allay either the fears of individual creators or the media world at large, Pickett goes on to insist that YouTube's role is to build a platform. "We leave the actual creation of great videos to the people who do it best: our partners."