It seems like the topic of conversation lately has been ART SCHOOL: IS IT WORTH IT? It’s been centered mostly around this article by Noah Bradley called Don’t go to art school. It’s a good article and it has some good resources for budding artists. Taking it to heart will be the right choice for some people.
I get messages all the time from prospective art students asking me about my experience at Maryland Institute College of Art, and whether I’d consider it worth it. I hesitate to answer these, since I only graduated about a month ago, I haven’t even started paying back my loans, and my opinion is fairly nuanced.
Is art school worth it? I don’t know. I really don’t.
I graduated school with a book deal. And I graduated school almost 100k in debt.
I was 17 when I enrolled in art school and honestly, the financial reality of it failed to really register with me. I couldn’t comprehend of that amount of money, and I think I kind of expected my parents to help me pay for it. But my parents can’t pay for it – all that debt is on me. It’s my responsibility, and every time I think about it my heart sinks.
I don’t know where I’d be without art school. Sometimes I’m tempted to think that my successes happened to me despite art school, instead of because of it. But that’s not really fair. I learned Photoshop at art school, and I can’t go a day without it now. I discovered comics at art school. I studied under illustrators who had a huge influence on me, and shared inspiration with a group of other hugely talented illustrators who gave me feedback and pushed me to be better. It taught me the value of connections and put me in a position to seek them out. I applied for internships because of art school, and it was my internship at BOOM! Studios that’s the reason I’m living in Los Angeles right now. As a kid who grew up homeschooled without much in the way of art classes, art school introduced me to a broader range of inspiration than I could have possibly discovered on my own.
So do I recommend art school? I don’t know.
I think maybe not for everyone.
I think that’s what you should take away from Noah Bradley’s article. If you’re going to be taking on this debt yourself – if you’re not going to have it paid for by parents or huge scholarships and grants – you need to think super hard about this. It’s A LOT of money. And art school is NOT for everyone.
Art school isn’t about the grades. It’s not about the diploma. It’s about you, pushing as hard as you can to get the most out of it that you can. You can graduate with straight A’s and no one will care. You have to work your ass off. You have to give up a lot. I can’t tell how many weekends I’ve spent never once leaving my apartment because I was working around the clock to finish an assignment.
And to be successful, you can’t get too hung up on school, either. Some of what you do will have to be despite school, because you’re going to be seeking your own path and art school can’t lay that out for you. I’ve cut classes to go to conventions, I’ve had to balance homework with freelance opportunities, and my grades suffered some because of that. Art school isn’t going to hand you success – it might offer you opportunities, but even then they’re few and far between and you’ll have to fight other students for them – what art school WILL give you is TOOLS. The real value of art school, the part you can’t get from books or online tutorials, is that it creates an environment where you’re FORCED to work (maybe too hard) and you’re forced to be CRITICAL of your own work. You’re forced to look at your work in context. You’re going to be fully immersed in a world that’s going to tell you exactly what it thinks of you (it’s okay – it will be wrong sometimes). You are surrounded by sources of feedback – students and other teachers – and it’s going to be hard. You’re going to cry. And it’s going to hurt to crank out that much work – but in the end YOU WILL HAVE WORK.
It’s impossible to say where I’d be without that.
Is it worth it? I don’t know. Call me back in ten years. Or twenty. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be sixty before I can even pay back all these loans. Maybe I’ll die and I won’t have to pay them back! (that is the only loophole for loans).
When I was seventeen, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be a published author. I wanted to make enough on my art to support myself. I wanted to google my name and have it be the first result. I spent hours in Barnes and Nobles just looking at the books and imagining what it was like to have made them. I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know how to get there.
I got farther than I ever thought I’d get in four years. I’m happy with where I am now, and excited about where I’m going to go. I still have trouble believing how lucky I’ve been. And yeah, I owe a lot of that to art school.
So we’ll see, I guess.
Good luck, art babies.