Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 1 of 8
Administration
September 22, 2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of
Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’
By Scott Carlson
Baltimore
Not all parents would display the restraint Russell Benamy did
when his daughter Erica declared her intention to go to art school.
Sure, he was dismayed: "$200,000 to play with crayons?" the
management consultant, who was a chemical-engineering major,
recalls thinking. "You’ve got to be kidding me."
But he didn’t share that with Erica. "This is my daughter’s
passion," he says. "I am going to tell her she can’t go?" So she came
here to the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Higher education can’t escape the debate about a degree’s return
on investment. Increasingly, colleges of all types feel pressure to
show that four years of tuition payments will lead to decent
salaries and viable careers. While classics and philosophy present
a challenge, ceramics and painting are another altogether, one
that art schools must meet to remain vital.
Art-and-design colleges face age-old perceptions about slim job
prospects for "starving artists." Yet they need a steady stream of
students. Even some of the sector’s elite institutions are highly
tuition-dependent. Given emerging ratings of colleges’ worth, artschool administrators have reason to worry: Standard
measurements of the payback on a college degree might not fairly
capture artists, who have anything but a predictable path.
Conveying the value of an art-school education was the prime
topic of conversation at a national conference in April for
nonprofit art colleges. It happened to coincide with the release of
the "College ROI Report" by the salary-information company
PayScale, ranking 1,312 institutions on students’ earnings. Places
with strong science and technology programs tend to do well. This
year colleges like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 2 of 8
University of the Arts, in Philadelphia; and the Ringling College of
Art and Design landed in the bottom quarter of the list. The
Maryland Institute College of Art, known as MICA, ranked 1,305th.
Students, though, don't seem to care. MICA, along with other
prominent arts institutions, like the Pratt Institute and the Rhode
Island School of Design, seems to be thriving. In the past 20 years,
its enrollment has grown to 2,200, from around 900, and it has
expanded across midtown Baltimore, constructing some of the
city’s most architecturally striking new buildings. In a market that
includes powerhouse design schools and tiny fine-arts
institutions, MICA has found a way to attract a segment of the
college-going population.
Art colleges conduct surveys and collect testimonials from
students and parents to paint a positive picture of the prospects
for art and design majors. Statistics show that graduates make
decent salaries and report satisfaction with their careers and lives.
And the institutions—which from the beginning prepare students
for a kind of entrepreneurial self-employment—have maintained
or heightened a vocational approach.
It’s helped that design has gained popular attention for its role in
organizations, products (see iPhones), and politics (consider the
presence of Shepard Fairey’s "Hope" poster in Barack Obama’s
2008 campaign).
Mr. Benamy, for one, has come around to believing that his
daughter made a good choice. "Sending her four years to fuel her
love of learning, have her master a field or craft, learning about
design and design thinking, that was really the crux about how I
got myself comfortable," he says. Now he shares that message,
along with other parents, in a video featured prominently on
MICA’s website, promoting the "value of an art education."
Constraints and Risks
Times are tough for any tuition-dependent college, and like many
others out there, private nonprofit art schools tend to be small and
underendowed. Art Center College of Design, one of the country’s
premier art institutions, with a beautiful hilltop campus in
Pasadena, Calif., has an endowment of only $70-million. MICA’s is
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 3 of 8
$80-million, an amount typical for a relatively unknown private
college, not an institution prominent in its field.
What’s more, many nonprofit art schools are competing for a
narrower band of students than are traditional colleges. Their forprofit counterparts, meanwhile, have aggressive marketing
campaigns and deep pockets. (The Academy of Art University is
one of the largest property owners in San Francisco.)
And their small size can make institutions especially fragile. Many
members of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and
Design enroll fewer than 100 undergraduates and graduate
students, and follow a "classic atelier model" of art education, with
artists simply working in a studio with a master, says Deborah
Obalil, the group’s executive director.
Some in the sector worry that financial pressures and a limited
pool of students will lead to closings. The College of Visual Arts, a
65-year-old institution in St. Paul, had 170 students when it shut
down last year, citing rising costs and dwindling enrollment. An
alumni group tried but failed to raise $3-million to save it.
Some of the smallest art schools are looking to survive by merging
with larger institutions, with a number of negotiations under way,
says Ms. Obalil. In May, George Washington University reached a
deal to take over the Corcoran College of Art and Design, affiliated
with the financially troubled Corcoran Gallery of Art, in
Washington. The Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, which had
struggled with declining enrollment and accreditation hurdles,
had 80 students in July, when the University of New Haven
acquired it.
Steven H. Kaplan, the university’s president, sees potential for the
arts programs. The university can bring scale to marketing,
admissions, financial aid, and other administrative duties, he says.
In time, he thinks the arts programs can grow to 250 students, with
greater entrepreneurial prospects.
"I can picture some of our computer-science and software
engineers sitting on a rooftop garden on our campus in Tuscany
with a couple of these artists," he says, "creating the next
Facebook."
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 4 of 8
Return on Investment
Successful art colleges have increasingly highlighted the role of art
and design in innovation and start-up culture. And they have
combined those descriptions with data to show prospective and
current students, as well as graduates, how alumni have led long
and fruitful careers making art.
Matt Roth for The Chronicle
Samuel Hoi, president of the Maryland Institute College of Art,
helped originate a survey that shows high job satisfaction among
arts alumni well after graduation.
As president of the Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles,
Samuel Hoi knew he needed to turn the conversation about the
value of art school toward the quantitative. When he arrived at
Otis, in 2000, faculty members and administrators talked about
students’ success mainly through anecdotes—this or that one
getting hired by a prominent design firm, toy company, or
animation studio. Mr. Hoi pushed to survey alumni on
employment and job satisfaction.
Otis sent out its first survey in 2002 and repeated the process
roughly every two years after that. The results were a pleasant
surprise, and remained fairly consistent even through the
economic downturn, says Mr. Hoi. Two-thirds to three-quarters of
graduates got jobs before finishing college, and 90 to 95 percent
were employed a year later. Three-quarters were working in their
creative fields even 25 years later, and about 80 percent said they
were satisfied with their life choices.
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 5 of 8
Otis has promoted the figures in marketing materials, and officials
there have presented the numbers to faculty and staff members to
emphasize the importance of outcomes—and to boost morale.
The college also shared the results with donors to demonstrate the
returns on their investments.
The Otis survey influenced the creation of the Strategic National
Arts Alumni Project, a national survey of 92,000 alumni
administered by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary
Research. (Mr. Hoi served on the advisory board for that survey.)
Results have shown high job satisfaction and involvement in the
arts well past graduation.
And while salaries for arts alumni aren’t as high as those in other
fields, they’re not poverty wages. Arts educators, designers, and
photographers have median incomes of $45,000. Craft artists make
substantially less ($25,000), but film and video artists make more
($55,000). The figures are consistent with those published by
Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce,
which shows a median salary of $47,000 for bachelor’s-degree
holders in the arts versus $59,000 for college graduates over all.
While the association of art schools doesn’t keep data on average
student-loan debt, Ms. Obalil estimates that art students’ debt
levels aren’t all that different from those of others. At the Maryland
Institute College of Art, where 95 percent of students get some
form of financial aid, average debt is about $34,000, compared
with $29,400 nationally. Thirty percent of graduates leave with no
debt at all, about the same as the national rate.
Now president of MICA, Mr. Hoi says he notices students’
vocational savvy. Relative to students who wind up majoring in
communications or psychology, art students form a "tribe," he
says, who make an intentional choice. "They know that there is
probably not a direct line to a job in the industry. To persist in the
fine arts, they need to be creative and open to all sorts of life
strategies." (He should know: In an "early life crisis," Mr. Hoi says,
he gave up a legal career after graduating from Columbia Law
School and enrolled at the Parsons School of Design to study
illustration.)
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 6 of 8
MICA’s career-development office recently hired a sixth staff
member, dedicated to cultivating relationships with prospective
employers like the Smithsonian, UnderArmour, and Oscar de la
Renta. Tapping networks of parents is another new strategy. And
graduates can return to the career office anytime for help. Lately
the office has seen alumni from the 1970s who’ve decided to go
back to art after careers in other fields.
Erica Benamy, now a senior graphic-design major, has had
internships at Puma, the footwear company, and the publicrelations firm FleishmanHillard. Her instructors are all working
artists, she says, which promotes a focus on work.
"The best advice I have gotten in the past year is to act like your
professors are clients," Ms. Benamy says, because any of them
might be the contact that leads to a job. She may go to work as a
designer for an established product, but she dreams of using
design to advance social causes—for example, redesigning the
packaging and instructions for birth-control pills, she says, to
make them easier for women to use.
Skepticism about art school is, in a strange way, liberating, says
Ms. Benamy. "There is a different kind of art-school thinking that
teaches you to be independent. You are able to talk to and
convince people of what you’re doing and why."
Fields like graphic design and photography have clearer
connections than do others to paid work. Students in fine arts, for
example, can have a tougher road. But that doesn’t mean they
regret their choice.
Louis Abbene-Meagley, who graduated from MICA last year, is
making a life as a painter, even if that’s not what pays the bills. He
works full time at a craft-beer pub not far from his studio, a
converted auto-repair shop in Baltimore’s gentrifying mill district.
"This is my other full-time job," he says, gesturing to the paintings
up on the walls, "the one that won’t go away until the day I die."
Thanks to scholarships from MICA and some help from his
parents, Mr. Abbene-Meagley has no debt. While he derives energy
from working out his thoughts through painting, relying on it for
income at this stage might deplete that energy, he says. Matisse
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 7 of 8
began his working life as a lawyer, he points out, and Magritte
worked in a wallpaper factory to make ends meet.
"I don’t think I want to be a server for 40 years, but if I end up like
Matisse, I’ll do it," says the young painter. College connected him
with fellow artists and with gallery owners, showing him how the
business works. He sold two paintings recently, he says, for $2,800.
Then he adds, smiling, "I’m still waiting on that check, actually."
14 Comments
aaronmoore •
"Payback" = salary? Or education?
•
•
pkassel •
This is an old story with a new (ish) angle--ROI. Artists have forever and will
always have to justify their existence to a skeptical audience, and perhaps that
is even more so schools of art.
•
•
pkassel •
As I was saying, the conversation at a national level on ROI is missing some
crucial elements. Measuring the value of an education (or a human being, for
that matter) by a mere measure of credits and debits is absurd and a bit chilling.
First, lets admit that we cannot actually know the impact a person or their life's
work will have on the world (e.g., Van Gogh). Second, what kind of life would it
be if we didn't have art from a wide range of people--is the only the rich who can
afford art school
•
•
stevecovello •
My father was a music composer with an MA (1952). My wife is an oil painter
with an MFA (1996). Both learned few practical skills for earning a living.
Neither are suited for any other kind of work other than tenuous teaching gigs.
While the article focuses on the economic calculus, it might be worth it for art
schools to consider offering family studies courses to explore the ways artists
and musicians with "successful" family lives have managed to do it while
maintaining a rich creative lifestyle.
•
•
aaronmoore
•
(I have some things in common with both your family members, though I
have been lucky . . . and more . . .) Also speaking of "the arts," certainly
*offering* more options is a neat idea, but were it to become the norm or
a requirement, it could veer toward social engineering or devaluation of
those who are looking to focus on their vocation rather than on planting
themselves into capitalist society in a normative manner. FWIW, I have
no use for romanticizing the "artist as outsider," and I am disheartened
by the way academics—even more than artists—so often lack life skills,
but those are less to do with getting than getting along. But certainly one
has a right to be impractical or even maladjusted, no matter what others
think. I hate to think that culturally and socioeconomically nonconforming
artists will be marginalized even within the arts Which I have seen
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014
Art Schools Work to Erase Image of Graduates as ‘Starving Artists’ - Administration - Th... Page 8 of 8
http://chronicle.com/article/Art-Schools-Work-to-Erase/148917/?key=SmhwJFBpbCZCM... 9/26/2014