Ranking Art Schools

ethomasnj
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:04:51 +0000

Everyone is forgetting tiny MCAD, which wins a ton of illustration awards for its size, Ringling which wins even more and dominates animation. Daughter got in, but felt it was too “macho” would be a good term. If we do this we should go by society of illustrators awards, animation awards, and design awards, divided by number of students in the programs. additionally payscale ranks ROI on undergrad art schools and in the last two years only RISD and Pratt have scored decently, though they flipflopped positions by year. That takes it out of opinion and into math. I ranked the schools using the awards, tuition, reputation(yes that opens doors), and ROI. Pratt, RISD, Ringling, MICA and due to its tiny size and large number of awards MCAD and KCAD did very well. Daughter just chose RISD After visiting all but KCAD, mostly because she was most impressed with student work in two departments. She was not impressed with the furniture work at RISD, and neither of us felt capable of judging architecture. However Cooper while she was impressed with the idea of going there, she didn’t love the emphasis on non-figurative art in the professors CV’s, nor was she happy with the output from a Saturday class there. SVA she loved some of the work, but has 6 friends who go there, with common interests “she helps run some kind of fan club for some odd comic” when she introduced them, they didn’t know each other, even though they were in the same major and many were quite a bit older than her, additionally the dorms were ranked by her as a 1 on a scale of 1-10 and she wants a “college” experience, she felt she got that a lot more taking classes at Parsons, and she wasn’t thrilled with that. So quality of life has to come into play just as quality of art comes in, while Dad was thrilled with idea of applying to Cooper, she was actually bitterly opposed and wouldn’t do it due to her research on the faculty and experience with installation art there. SCAD lost out not because of its accreditation, but because they accept kids without portfolio if they can