Hi everyone. STEM parent here who has gone through the college application process with one son applying to Computer Science, and is now going through college apps with an art kid who wants to study Digital Animation. (He would be happy animating characters, but I could see him also be happy writing shows.)
So, admissions for CS is amazingly competitive - some schools admit only 6% of their applicants and top schools like MIT have no such thing as a merit scholarship. So I’m looking at the admissions rates for art schools which seem to be in the range of 50-80% and many of them are offering merit scholarships (which of course, could just be $3K and they add it into the price and it’s really a gimmick…) but there’s definitely something I don’t understand. Why are art schools admissions rates so high?
Am I just not looking at the “competitive” ones?
Is it that if you’re crazy enough to pay high tuition for an art degree, they’ll let you in?
Is it that they take everyone and half the people drop out later?
And most of all - how many schools should a kid apply to? Because for STEM - especially CS --a lot of kids are applying to 15-25 schools assuming they’ll only make it into 2-3, and validly so. But I’m thinking if colleges have a 50%+ admissions rate, doing the same for art schools is just wasting people’s time and that he should pare down the list first. How many would you apply to?
I think it’s just like CS - you saw kids applying to 15-25 but kids could apply to one. CS is not overly competitive. CS is overly competitive if you only apply to highly selective schools.
My engineer applied to 15 but turns out he loved most the super safety he attended. But it was the last school he applied to. Had no intention til he visited on college visit day.
The point being - if you have an affordable safety or two the student prefers, you don’t need many.
If your list is full of expensive or difficult admissions schools - you need more.
Truth is, you need only one school of affordable and a shoo in admission wise.
I don’t see why the overall rationale will change here.
I believe in choice but also planning smartly. If you are full pay and have a budget that’s less than full pay, I wouldn’t apply to no merit schools as an example.
Good luck.
Lots of merit givers on this list….or lower cost schools.
Do any require portfolios ? That would require more choice.
“CS is overly competitive if you only apply to highly selective schools.” Yes, but if you took the list of the top 10 CS schools, the admissions rates for those schools (if admitted generally) or the CS program itself would be under 10%. MIT (4%), CMU (5%), Stanford (4%), Berkeley (3-12?% depending on gender), etc.
Looking at the art schools in your list:
|1|California Institute of the Arts|California|Top 1%| - 25% acceptance rate
|2|Savannah College of Art and Design|Georgia|Top 1%| – 82% acceptance rate
|3|Ringling College of Art and Design|Florida|Top 2%| - 65% acceptance rate
|4|School of Visual Arts|New York|Top 2%| - 87% acceptance rate
|6|Rhode Island School of Design|Rhode Island|Top 3%| - 17% acceptance rate
|7|Pratt Institute|New York|Top 4%| - 50% acceptance rate
8 Gnomon School of Visual Effects California - 49% acceptance rate
|12|ArtCenter College of Design|California|Top 6%| - 71% acceptance rate
|13|Rochester Institute of Technology|New York|Top 7%| - 67% acceptance rate (for the school)
|14|Full Sail University|Florida|Top 7%| - 100% acceptance rate
|15|Academy of Art University|California|Top 8%| - 100% acceptance rate
Those acceptance rates are WAY higher than the CS program.
So my son was engineering at Michigan and Daughter in BFA at Illinois Wesleyan theater /costume design then off to Beloit for anthropology with Polo Sci minor and starting her Masters In Speech Pathology.
Right brain vs left Brain. Lots of creative students have lower GPAs. It’s the same for performers, artist, athletes. Of course there are those that can do it all.
Many engineering students are not great in writing per se and tend to have lower scores also.
That’s the way I see it at least.
But I wouldn’t worry about it. Find the best “fit” for your child,Regardless of percentages.
As an example my daughter went to a pre performing high school. Sorta like the “Fame” school in NY. These kids had regular school till 1:00 then did their art to about 6:00pm daily. Then homework and rinse and repeat and most Saturdays also. Each performance was 8/9 runs and had to be off book in 2 weeks for musical theater. These kids are focusing on their craft. But some went to places like Northwestern, Michigan etc but lots went to the leading programs in their interest regardless of GPA or percentages accepted. They went to the best schools for their craft.
Also CS is in demand. Writing etc is not. Hence the lower % in CS.
My daughter applied to 11 schools and was accepted into 10. Most with merit and she made her own interviews. Her grades were OK but her portfolio was at a different level. She was clever about it since most were not official interviews. She met with usually the head of the departments and brought her portfolio with. Lol. They naturally wanted to take a peak. This worked extremely well for her.
But she spent the time researching the schools and for her the heads of the department and what connections they had in Chicago etc etc.
For your child have him research what’s important to him for future jobs. Lots of these creative kids change out of their majors BTW as illustrated by my daughter. It’s not uncommon. So get prepared for that. Lots of them tend to take their skills and use it in a different direction. Lots of businesses love hiring theater students for many various reasons and threads about that on here.
The question is how many you should actually apply to. Because 21 makes sense if you’re a computer science major. Just statistically if everyone admits 4%, you’d need to apply to 25 places to get into 1.
For art schools, half of the schools are admitting more than half their applicants. So how many do people (and by people I mean the artists on this forum applying to art schools) normally apply to?
Again the answer is based on the stats, budget and where you are applying (likelihood of admissibility). zero difference bs CS. Could be one. Could be 21.
CS is not a competitive entry. CS is a competitive entry if you applied only to highly rejective schools.
I will be facing this question in 2026 and have wondered the same since so many highly regarded art schools have such high acceptance rates.
What I’ve heard from others…at many art schools the acceptance rates are really high because they don’t have as many applicants as more traditional colleges. Of course there are exceptions. I’ve also heard the amount of merit can vary a lot (Cooper Union is now free for seniors supposedly!) so the more important that is to
Your decision, the more you may want to apply to.
My 2026 will apply to a mix of art schools and traditional schools. We are looking at a lot of schools right now and plan to pare down the list. I’m finding there is a lot of similarity in portfolio requirements across schools so its not a lot of extra work to apply to more art schools. Most don’t seem to require supplemental essays beyond the artist statement. (ArtCenter is an exception to this - lots of really specific requirements so we may cut it) Hoping to narrow it to 5-6 art schools and 5-6 traditional schools.
A corollary question…I’d love to know how much of a bump a strong portfolio can give to an applicant to a highly rejective traditional college. Hard to get a sense of this.
I don’t agree. When I was applying to colleges back in 1989, I applied to 3. I got into two. MIT and Berkeley. In Canada, which currently has merit-based admissions, they know based on their grades which colleges they’ll get into so they apply to 2-5. When my son (he ended up going to UWaterloo) told them he’d applied to 16 they said our system is crazy.
This idea that you have to apply to 21 colleges is an American thing that is out of control. So it makes a lot of sense when you see admissions rates in another field that are much higher than you see in science/engineering to stop and ask “what is reasonable here?” If you apply to 21 schools because you know you’ll only get into 2 of them, you’re playing the game. If you apply to 21 schools and you get into all of them, you’re really wasting your time and the admissions officers time (especially since some of these places are waiving applications fees - you’re also wasting their money).
Once you have at least one safety/highly likely school on the list that is affordable, your kid can apply to as many other schools as they want.
In the art school world you have to sort thru whether or not a portfolio is required for admission, whether a certain type of art degree within a given school has a lower acceptance rate as compared to the overall, net COA, schools with financial difficulties, and the for-profit schools. I would avoid for-profit schools like School of Visual Arts NY, Academy of Art Uni, Gnomon, and Full Sail from your list above. They tend to be expensive, and can have lower than average career placement.
I expect Cooper Union’s acceptance rate is going to continue to decrease:
For the Academic Year 2023-2024:
Admission
12% overall acceptance rate based on the total number of completed Common Applications submitted for fall 2023 (4% School of Architecture, 8% School of Art, 23% School of Engineering) Facts About Cooper Union | The Cooper Union
I wonder if that’s why Art Center has a 100% admit rate [ Whoops. I mixed up Academy of Art and Art Center. Art Center is 71% admit rate ]
Agreed - a lot less essays.
I am finding the portfolio requirements to be a gating factor for my son. If someone’s doing traditional media (drawing/painting/sculpture), then I don’t think they’d see a difference. We’ve nixed some schools based on their portfolio requirements. For example RISD doesn’t want to see digital art (“2-3 pieces are ok”), so that tells me it’s going to be too much studio art for him. School of Art in Chicago tells kids to include whatever they want with the aim of supporting their artist statement. So for him, a portfolio of digital character art, music, and storyboards goes really far towards his artist statement.
He also nixed Laguna because it was requiring a lot of drawings that he felt like “this is what I’m going to school for. If I already knew how to do this, I wouldn’t need to go” (which is unfortunate because it has a good animation program).
This seems like a reasonable goal and I like how you’re aiming for both traditional and art schools. I don’t expect my kid to change majors, but we’ve all agreed that it would be a good idea for him to take business classes, so a traditional school would be more likely to offer that as a minor or a second major. You know… just in case AI kills his career path.
Cal Arts and Ringling both have around a 10% acceptance rate for the computer animation degree. Cal Arts is more traditional 2D art and Ringling is 3D (pixar). SCAD has a higher acceptance rate but you aren’t really accepted into the CA major until after 2 years–then it is more portfolio based acceptance into the major. SVA is more “experimental” (for lack of a better term). RISD is more of a “fine art” school rather than being strong in the animation major. Full Sail is a for profit school–they like to say you can “accelerate” your courses to finish faster but that would be extremely difficult–beware the sales hype. RIT is more technical than art based.
Best bet is to go to National Portfolio Days at a school and get feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of your portfolio. I believe you can sign up for this virtually also but the best experience is to attend in person.
All portfolios are heavily figure drawing from life. CA portfolio they love action to be shown–the baseball player swinging the bat vs a still life of fruit. Art schools are ART schools–they have other classes to fulfill gen ed requirements but you gotta love art first and foremost.
Look up the caliber of the student’s work which can usually be found on the school’s website. You’ll have a clearer understanding of the differences between the schools.
All of them are going to require “a lot of drawings”. And you’ll do a lot of drawing. You need to LOVE to do art if you’re going to an ART school. They make decent/good artists great if you can take the criticism and feedback to heart.
Thank you - I didn’t realize this about SCAD. But that would also explain why they don’t have a portfolio requirement. We’ll have to dicsuss this then… I’m not sure he’d want to get 2 years in and then be told he won’t be able to do his preferred major and has to transfer somewhere else… (I’m not saying that he can’t make it, but I wouldn’t go betting $80K on it. Not a gambler…)
We’re signed up for SF’s in person.
Thanks for the tip. I think he likes art, but that doesn’t mean he likes to do studio art. And he’s really not going to college because he wants to go, but because he wants the job. If he could skip and go into industry he would. So I don’t think two years of doing stuff he’s not interested in is his thing. For some kids, 2 years of being away from home just being able to create stuff and avoiding the real world is a dream.
I hesitate to suggest it because I’m not overly familiar with the program but Animation Mentor is very well known as on-line courses to learn animation. It has a good reputation from what I’ve gathered over the years. It would be a cheaper way to try out whether CA is actually something you love while preparing you with tools you need if you decide to pursue it on a college level. Not everyone goes to college for animation. No matter how you approach the field it will depend on your talent and frankly work ethic.
Some people think art school is “easier” than stem. I assure you it is not. Especially CA (especially at Ringling) ( my D went there for CA). Of most importance to note is animation is NOT a large field. A very small number of people get “the” animator positions. But there are a lot of side lines along the way which is why Ringling teaches the entire pipeline–many find jobs/passions in other aspects. Story is another VERY small field.
Sign up for schools you are actually considering (get there early) and look specifically for someone who looks at animation portfolios. Have the portfolio as ready to go as possible and only include your best. Many think animation means digital art–but the best animators are those who are best at figure drawing (hence the emphasis) and no way around it there is studio art involved–not oil painting and still lifes etc but drawing from life is a huge aspect. All the aspects of art like perspective (downfall for many), human anatomy, showing action is a huge part.
[ Whoops. I mixed up Academy of Art and Art Center. Art Center is 71% admit rate ]