And also I'd like to talk about some of the ways that I think these schools can maybe fix it.

First, what qualifies as an art school? In this video I'm talking about specifically private four-year colleges of art and design, and some of the ones that have recently closed.

Those are the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Delaware College of Art and Design, the University of Arts in Philadelphia, the American Academy of Art in Chicago that actually just announced its closure last week, and the San Francisco Art Institute right here in the Bay Area.

All of these closures have been quite shocking, especially to the faculty and students who oftentimes never saw it coming. And that's bad. Getting caught off guard by the fact that your school that you're teaching and working at is closing is very, very bad. I don't want to see layoffs like this happen to anyone, and I think especially these students probably feel so uncertain that they've gotten themselves in a bunch of debt already and their school closes. I don't wish this kind of thing upon anyone, which is why I think it's important to talk about. I have tons of respect for folks that teach in higher ed, especially in these schools. However, I think there are definitely some issues with the way they are run and some things around administration that I'm going to talk about in this video. So let's go ahead and wade into the depths of why these art schools keep closing. One of the main reasons these schools keep closing is cost. Quite frankly, they have gotten way too expensive. Tuition is truly blooming. When I went to the Kansas City

Art Institute, I started in 2009, and back then tuition was $28,000 a year. I managed to receive a half-tuition scholarship and some other financial aid packages, and so I paid a little bit less than $14,000 a year, meaning that I walked away with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting for less than $56,000. Pretty good. In order to help keep my cost of living low, I worked the entire time that I was in school, much to the dismay of my professors. I would spend loads and loads of time on my summers and weekends working a retail job, so that way I could pay my rent, afford food, and afford the really expensive supplies that you're required to buy in art school.

But this ended up having a negative impact on my grades. I actually had one particular professor in my foundation's year that I went to his office hours because I got to be in his class.

I thought that the work that I did was exceptional, and I just wanted to know his feedback. What did

I do wrong? And he told me, point blank, that having a job was keeping me out of the studio.

And to me, that made no sense. Looking back now to my little 18-year-old self, I was starting to see the classism that exists in the art world play out right in front of me in this professor, who had a job in order to support his practice. But working through college is a normal thing.

Most students work through college. It's a really great way to avoid taking out private, high-interest student loans. Those private loans can be really scary because oftentimes they also come with variable interest rates. And to me, the companies that run those private student loans are very fraudulent, and they're taking advantage of children. But I want to go back to my school, right? I went there in 2009. That's 15 years ago. But inflation is truly mad because that same school

I went to is now $43,000 a year. I put that into a calculator, and that is a 53.6% increase in cost.

Now, that's honestly a little bit higher than current inflation, and that number is truly crazy.

That means that you're essentially looking at $172,000 for a four-year degree in art and design.

And unfortunately, that school's kind of cheap compared to some of the other big players in the game. Let's take, for example, RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design. That school right now is currently $61,564 a year. But they actually estimate the total amount that it costs per year to attend is $85,986 a year, meaning that it's a general cost between $246,000 and $343,944 to go get a BFA. What? Like, I just, that is criminal. That should not be the case. Like, you should not pay that much for a degree. Okay. I looked into a little bit more data, and I looked into what was my dream school. I really, really badly wanted to go to CalArts.

And back in 2009, it was $42,000 a year, and I said, I can't afford that. That's gonna be a mortgage payment when I get out of school. Like, I just, I can't see myself living and going to that college. It is now $77,300 a year to go there. That means that for four years, it's $309,000 for a four-year degree. These are not doctors we are talking about. These are people studying painting. And honestly, these estimates are even higher because tuition increases between 2% and 5% every year. And truly, if I'm being honest, the math is not mathing here.

I don't know how we can justify selling this to students. If you're working in admissions in these schools, how are you justifying this? Like, what is the cost-benefit analysis here? Because that math is not logical. To really illustrate this point, I need to talk about the financial consequences. So what I did is I took them and I put each of these assumed loans of between 70 and 80 grand into a student loan payment calculator. And what I got was between $2,400 and $3,400 a month, which is more than the average two-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How can you justify paying this for college and having that kind of a payment? I think taking on this level of debt for any degree should not be the case. I truly think the American educational system is fundamentally broken if this is the way we're doing things. But I don't think these young kids who are 18, who are signing these loan papers away, who have been conditioned to believe that going to college is the way forward, are going to be okay when they get into their late 20s and their 30s and their 40s and they can't do things like buy a house, buy a car. They are just trapped by that debt. I truly would be in so much financial trouble if I had a payment like that every single month. Plus, these loans are carrying a 6.8 or higher interest rate, which means that while the government's giving you the money to go to school, they're also profiting on your debt, which is a whole nother problem. Okay, okay, let's be optimistic. Let's say you get a ton of scholarships. You get like almost a full ride to go to one of these schools. Maybe you find some like work study and you graduate with like almost no debt. Then is it a good idea to go to one of these institutions? It is important to remember what your payment is going to be after. So when you're figuring this out, putting things into a loan calculator and actually finding out what it is you're going to have to make to make that payment at the end is the smartest thing to do before you sign on the dotted line. I do think these are good schools. I met some of my best friends at art school, I felt really lucky that I was able to spend all of this time honing and focusing my craft and be able to really use that. Because that's opened up a lot of doors for me, especially as a teacher. Now, I got a good education from mostly compassionate people who had most of my best interests at heart. But I did not learn the skills of entrepreneurship.

Like at all. I did not learn how to run a business. I did not learn how to be a freelancer.

I did not learn the skills that I now need in order to pay my bills. And I think the fact that

I had to learn most of that on my own, or in order to learn that on my own, I actually had to intentionally unlearn some of the ways that I was taught in order to get to where I am now is a problem. So let's go into that. So these four-year private art colleges, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, RISD, CalArts, all of these schools take two paths, essentially, with their students. You can either focus on applied arts, like graphic design, illustration, I would even say filmmaking is kind of an applied art. And my friends who studied in these majors were perfectly set up for roles that were creative in their fields, which is amazing.

They graduated, a lot of them got well paying jobs, and some of them were even offered roles at different illustration firms. And that was huge. That was really cool to see. It was awesome seeing people get the same degree as me and not struggle as much as I did. However, I did learn, as of this morning on threads, that not all schools that teach these particular majors prepare people for careers in the field. So ask real hard questions of current students when you are thinking about going to these educational programs. If you take a second path, though, the path that I did towards a fine art major, something like painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, the schools are often operating from outdated models that are based on the rules of the art world. I personally felt trapped by unhealthy thought patterns and art world propaganda that made me make decisions that were not in my best interest. You're essentially pitted between working on your craft and making work that performs and speaks to the expectations and rules of the art world. And the art world is mostly a bad place. There are some exceptions.

There are some good arts nonprofits. I can think of two big ones in Kansas City, the Kansas City

Artists Coalition and Charlotte Street. There are artist-run galleries, if those still exist, the ones that survived the pandemic. In Kansas City, I think of Kiosk Gallery as a great example.

There are also some small, mid-tier gallery spaces that have real client lists that want to help you sell your work. But those are rare. They're kind of like unicorns. And the problem is these are often situations that are not run by artists for artists. A lot of times, arts organizations like museums are run by boards. And those boards are made up of people who are often big art collectors. But the board is the one who gets to say what happens and what doesn't.

And these board members can have really scary views sometimes. Before I go further, I want to show you how I've been deeply entrenched in this. I'm going to show you my artist resume.

Now, when I was going to school, I was somewhat of a star pupil. I took every piece of advice that my professors gave me to the letter. I was a straight-A student. I was a rule follower.

I even started teaching in my school's community extension the month I graduated. I wanted so badly to be a professor of fine art. I wanted to be a professional artist. That was my dream. Those were my goals. But I got duped. So here is my resume. I'm going to put it on the screen here and scroll through it. So the first thing that you see here, these are projects that I did for free or that I paid to do. These next things, teaching, this is where I've made most of my money as an artist. And still, it's the thing that pays most of my bills. Then next up, we've got awards, grants, and residencies. I was really, really lucky in these spaces. And I felt great. The drugstore was amazing. Charlotte Street was incredible with their Rocket Grants program, which is actually funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation. I got lots of really cool opportunities like with the Oklahoma Visual Artists Coalition to do a little fellowship on art writing and curatorial studies. And those things kept me from going to graduate school. It ended up saving me tons of money. And while these were small, they were really special. But then let's talk about exhibitions. So these are all things that I had to pay to do. Every single exhibition that you do as an artist is going to usually have a fee that you pay to apply to be in the exhibition. You have to frame your work, and that cost me hundreds of dollars each time. Eventually, I learned that

Ikea frames are a really, really great way to go if you want to look professional, but you can't afford it. And I don't think that there's enough conversation about how much artists spend to be a part of exhibitions. But then next up, here are some times that I was written up in the press.

I didn't necessarily get paid for this, but I got some prestige points. I also was paid to be a lecturer at different schools or give critiques to students, both at my alma mater and at other schools in the region. Some of those payments were 50 bucks or 75 to come in and give a talk.

Here are some shows I curated. And when I say curating shows, I was mostly volunteering. This was unpaid work or work that I paid to do. Here next are articles that I published. I ran an arts and culture blog called Informality from 2013 to 2020 in Kansas City. And it was my baby. And I just wanted to give back to my community and write about everybody's art. But I really wasn't paying myself for that. Occasionally, we got grants, but I always prioritized giving that money to other writers and paying other people first, not necessarily valuing myself like I should have.

This CV that I shared with you was used by my school as an example for their current students.

But to be honest, it was really hard when I would have students come up to me and be like, oh, my teacher used your resume as an example. How do you do what you do? And I'd be like,

I sell shoes at Nordstrom. That's how I do what I do. I have a day job. And that day job is what allows me and enables me to do all of these other things. And some of those projects that I had done,

I got myself into more debt in order to do. I was convinced that the only way that I could be successful or get to my goal of being a professor was to continue to collect these prestige points on my CV. And it wasn't serving me. It just wasn't. However, when I was at Nordstrom,

I got to learn some really cool things. I got to learn how to sell stuff, which is hard. I got to learn how to build a business because everybody there works on commission. So I had to actually think about building customer relationships and what that was going to look like for me.

And it was a great lesson in running a business, even though there were mentors that I had that didn't think that job was very prestigious. But who cares? What I think is cruel about teaching students that this is the way forward is that it relies on luck and prestige as methods of accessing your ability to make a living. And that is not all right. You know, I couldn't afford to move to

New York, like some of my classmates, and just go like hobnob and make friends with and network with gallery owners and people who are connected to the New York art scene or the LA art scene.

I don't think that there's enough discussion about how much money is behind a lot of people who find success in the art world. And those are the success stories that we are told about.

And that's not okay. This is not the way. And when I had my falling out with my mentor that I talked about in my recent video about quitting art multiple times, it was honestly a moment for me, a reckoning for me, to realize that the way I was working was not working. It was not going to ever set me free and allow me to make my work. When that happened. The other thing was I lost my community, I lost my support network that was enabling me making a lot of the choices I was making in the community. And I it was devastating. I needed though, to see that the vision of success that my school had for me was not going to be the way forward. I had to get out of the art school rat race in order to find the work that I'm making now in order to find myself again. I really had to go through it. Remember that lines on a CV only mean something to a very specific kind of person to a very specific way of working and making in the arts. And you don't need that in order to be a valid artist. You don't need to do stuff for free. You don't need to just collect all of those lines, because what's it going to get you? Maybe $1,000 off your graduate degree, or maybe that'll get you on a hiring panel for a full-time tenure track position. These are becoming more and more scarce, especially as these schools are closing. And that should not be the path that everyone is looking towards, because it is truly unsustainable. Never once when I was in art school was I taught to consider the audience of my work as a real person. That thing that they often teach in business and marketing, which is called the ideal customer profile? We did none of that. I was instead taught to write in the language of museum texts and art forum, aka international art English, which is mostly gobbledygook. It uses way too many words that are overcomplicated when simple ones would do. And I don't think there's a real way that artists are taught to connect to potential collectors, customers, or see themselves as a business. But y'all, when you're selling work, you're selling $1,000 paintings, you are essentially running a luxury business. And you are selling luxury products. But no one in the art world wants to acknowledge this at all. They just want to pretend that it's like fairyland. And like, I am not Mickey Mouse. Like, I can't live like that. It wasn't until 2020, when I watched as the MoMA laid off most of their staff, especially their education staff, that I realized, wait a minute, I don't like this organization.

And then just after that, it was like the following week, the San Francisco Art Institute, which I had looked at for graduate school, was closing its doors. And I was like, wait a minute, all of these institutions that I put on pedestals are crumbling. I can start to actually ask questions as to why I think that this is valuable. Why do I want to operate in this way? What is the alternative? And what might that look like? I think that because these schools are teaching this one way of working, this one way of working as an artist that starts in galleries and ends in museum shows, that isn't right. If 99% of students graduate from an art school, and they can't make it in that path, they're just going to build resentment. And every single time that I post about these things on threads, I see that seething resentment come forward. And I know you probably have it too. So let me know in the comments. I also want to bring up that this way of working only serves the wealthiest class of art collector. And I can make a whole other video sometime about how the art world is basically just a speculative economy for billionaires and other members of the ultra wealthy to dodge taxes. But let's be real, like, do you want to make deeply personal work about your identity, and then have it be collected by some C-suite executive at Halliburton, and then have it sit in a storage unit for years, only for him to wait for it to go up in value and sell it off like a stock in his portfolio? Is that what you want for your life? Because that's not what I want. I think that's gross. This way of teaching that only serves artists that can land a museum show or professorship or recognition in art forum, those artists who can maybe land amongst their mentors and get that full time tenure track job.

It's not real. That's, that's, this is just this is this is a fiction that we are that we are operating from. And when it comes to those loans that I talked about earlier, I had professors who were like, yeah, if you want to get all that loans, all those loans forgiven, you know, all you need to do is get a job like mine where you're a full time tenure track instructor, you do that for 10 years, and then it's public student loan forgiveness, baby, you get all of that forgiven.

But like, to me now, as a person in their early 30s, I hear that. And as a person from the Midwest, and I hear multi level marketing, I hear a promise of something for your down levels that is never going to come true. And this should not be the way we are teaching students that is uncompassionate, and truly, truly dark. If you have had an experience like this, and you're relating to the things that I'm saying, let's start a little conversation down in the comments. Because I want to make more videos about the struggles y'all are having, because we are in this together, like, we're allowed to be angry. And I want to help you overcome that anger and resentment that you have, and get you back to making and creating.