A Marriage of Inconvenience: How Art and Design Private and Public Education is Failing to Prepare Students For Future Careers

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There is a perfect storm hitting higher education and the effects of this storm are impacting art and design education severely. The institutions that will be able to survive will be the ones that can react and innovate to rapidly changing forces, and to continue to rapidly change and innovate.

The perfect storm impacting higher education are

1.    Widening Gap Between Education and Practice 

2.    Inability of Education to Reinvent And to Innovate

3.    Student Debt

4.    Enrollment

5.    Disappearing Middleclass 

Widening Gap Between Education and Practice and the Inability to Reinvent and Innovate

The relationships between design education and practice have always been disconnected and disassociated. The disconnection is, in part, because education and practice operate at different speeds as well as have completely different organizational and accountability structures. Whilst we should be mindful that there is an obvious difference between education and practice and that distinction is an important one, we also need to be equally aware that the widening gap has now seriously affected the ability for higher education to prepare students for careers.  

This is because the way education is currently delivered cannot keep pace with the rapid change that is happening in practice. The gap is getting wider and education is now so far behind that they are preparing students for careers that do not exist anymore–they are preparing students for the past. One reason for the gap between education and practice is because the pace of innovation is getting faster, minute-by-minute, and year-by-year. One only needs to consider how technology has, and will continue to be important, and the level of technological innovation gets faster and faster year after year. The idea of how quickly technology and innovation are happening is best discribed by Marina Gorbis who wrote an article for the New York Times in 2015 entitled, “Innovation Is Happening Faster Than We Can Adapt to.” She outlined that technological innovations, that are coming out of Silicon Valley, are changing our institutional, societal and cultural norms and practices, and these new technologies put the world at our fingertips and help us coordinate activities at previously unimaginable speeds and scales. She goes on to say that although these new innovations are enabling new levels of convenience and flexibility, they are, at the same time, undermining well-established notions of work and employment. 

Technology has impacted art and design education and it is an endless struggle for both private and public institutions trying to “keeping up” with technology. Institutions have to continually look for funding, and continue to invest in keeping ahead of the technological curve. Technology also demands commitment and it takes commitment to recruit and how this innovation continues that it seems impossible to keep up. Departments have to recruit faculty who are adept at using technology as well as being adaptive learners. Those faculty who can adapt to the rapid technological change will be able to impart their knowledge to students and educate them for careers that will exist tomorrow. Administrators have to commit to training faculty who do not feel comfortable with technology, and once you jump on the technological merry-go-round you have to stay on no matter how fast it turns. Some faculty can manage the speed whilst others find it impossible to keep up. 

If these technologies are emerging faster than our institutional capacity can adapt to them, and if this is the new norm, then how many art and design programs will be able to keep up. And more importantly will they be able to offer these technological experiences to students. 

Ms. Gorbis makes this point clear when she states… 

            “We will need dynamic thinkers and policymakers to balance established needs with technological growth.”

Or if this statement was reframed for art and design education sustainable for the future it would read: 

            “We will need art and design administrators and faculty, who are dynamic            thinkers and who can understand and work with policymakers to balance         established needs with technological growth, and develop an educational experience that can rapidly adapt to change and prepare students for career futures.”

How is art and design education best serving and preparing students for careers that do not exist today? It is my firmest belief that we are in the business of folding time, and we are teaching students today for the profession of tomorrow. A high school student who is considering applying to a college of art and design would, roughly take, plus or minus, four years to graduate. In order to give this student, the competitive advantage and become a leader and innovator after graduation, then we have to teach this student today for, say, five years into his/her future. This means on graduation this student will have the skills for the career that will be five years in their future. An eighteen-year-old student who enters art and design college will be taught today for nine years in the future–it’s that simple. The simple sometimes is a little more complex, because we need to also consider how rapidly innovation and technology will exponentially increase over the same time, and the ability for institutions to fold time will also increase further and further into the future. There will be institutions that will be able to keep up and there will be those that will fall into the abyss. 

The problems of academia not having the ability of keeping up are many and have been longstanding there is however hope and this hope is from those institutions who can understand what they are doing wrong and correct bad behaviors and practices.

The best art and design institutions have always understood that art and design education is not in the replication game. They dissuade students from looking at the way things exist today and just copying them without question. These institutions believe they are in the innovation game and they demand and expect students to question everything and to innovate all the time. The institutions who continue to ask their students to replicate, will continue to struggle to recruit students and hire innovative faculty. The downward spiral will continue until they eventually collapse. 

The collapses can be seen every day and one only have to read the academic journals to realize that many art and design institutions, across the country, have closed their doors in the last 5-10 years, and these closures will become more frequent in the next 5-10 years. It is difficult for college administrators to react to the inevitability of their circumstance.  This is because most art and design faculty fail to understand is that they are running a business and that business happens to be art and design education, and it is difficult to remove those faculty who continue to teach the way they were taught or understand the relationships of business to education. 

If departments are teaching students exactly the way they were taught and administrators are incapable to apply best business practices, then they are dying only they haven’t realized it yet.

Student Debt

Enabling faculty to understand that education is a business is one thing, but the creation of student debt is another. The creation of student debt and how to reduce it is something that seems impossible for many institutions to figure out. In a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, written by Erica Ho, entitled, “Study: Art School Graduates Rack Up the Most Debt” analyzed and compared the Department of Education’s statistics from art and design programs and non-art and design programs, and found that graduates of art-focused schools tended to rack up the most debt. 

Ms. Ho went on to say that,

            “Student debt is crippling in of itself, but this debt is compounded when one considers that art and design degrees tend to result in lower-paying jobs overall.” 

Her figures were based on federal loans taken out in 2010-11 by students and their parents where the student is the responsible lienholder. She went on to report that, 

         “In 2012 alone, it is estimated that almost 67% of college students who graduated in       2012 had loans, up 63% from ten years ago…One art college in the study had a median           debt load for each student was $52,035, whilst the average salary for an alum, five years             out from graduation, made around $30,000 a year.”

In a similar article published in the New York Times in 2013, by Ruth Simon and Rob Barry, entitled, “A Degree Drawn in Red Ink-Graduates of Art-Focused Schools Are Shown to Rack Up the Most Student Debt”, built upon the Wall Street Journal article. But added that the Department of Education data indicated that the median debt loads at schools specializing in art, music and design averaged $21,576, which worked out to a loan payment of $248 a month and they compared this repayment amount to the average five year out salaries for graduated students averaged around $40,000.

Recent events do nothing to abate the increase in student debt. Both private and public art and design colleges continue to increase tuition and that increase puts a greater burden on students and their families. The belief of accessible higher education for all is broken and if things remain in place it will become higher education for the few, or for those who can afford it. One thing is clear, prospective students and their families are conducting research on colleges and universities prior to accepting any offers. They visit and revisit institutions, talk to faculty, students and the administration and whoever offers them the best financial and inspirational package is the one they accept and enroll in. 

Enrollment

It is not surprising that if tuition continues to increase and student debt becomes greater and greater that college enrollment will decline. Enrollment decline is probably one of the most serious and concerning trends that higher education needs to get their collective heads around if they want to survive. Enrollment numbers are going to inevitably decline in the future, and it is sobering to realize that enrollment has declined 9 percent since 2011. The reasons for this decrease are not obvious because there has been strong growth in enrollment in the preceding years, and no one is exactly sure why.

In 2018 Jane S. Shaw published an article in The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal entitled, “A Worrisome Trend for Higher Education: Declining Enrollments.”

The article discusses how the decrease in enrollment began when the federal government took a hard look at the relationships between tuition cost and employment percentages and how several large institutions closed immediately after.

Ms. Shaw states,

            “… the enrollment (sic) trend is down, according to the Clearinghouse, which tracks         admissions of approximately 97 percent of all students and reports more recent figures     than does the Department of Education.”

She goes on to say that, the decreases spread to community colleges and nonprofit colleges and universities, and although enrollments at four-year public universities are still largely holding even, there have been sporadic declines.  

The issue for private schools meeting enrollment targets is critical because they rely on tuition revenue to keep the doors open. The larger private institutions will be able to weather the storm for a while, because they tend to have large endowments as well as having a larger student populations, but the smaller private schools will be affected a lot sooner because their student populations are relatively small to start with.

Many schools have closed in this new environment, and in 2015, Sweet Briar College, an elite school for women in Virginia, shocked the higher education world by announcing it was closing in spite of a healthy endowment. Alumnae fought the closure in court, and the school was “rescued,” but the total enrollment is only about 365. Ms. Shaw stated.

Closures in the past couple of years include, The Santa Fe University of Art and Design; The Corcoran Gallery of Art and the School of Art; Memphis College of Art; The College of Visual Arts, St. Paul; Emory College Closed its Art Department; Burlington College in Burlington, Vermont; Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana; St. Gregory’s in Shawnee, Oklahoma; Concordia Alabama in Selma, Alabama; and Atlantic Union College in Lancaster, Massachusetts.  A few closures a year are not that unusual—about five a year are typical, although in 2015 Moody’s predicted that closures would triple. 

            “Numerous presidents at the institute agreed that they see an increased urgency among their peers interested in exploring significant changes in order to stabilize their            colleges’ standing or seek long-term viability,” she wrote. 

Enrollment problems threaten the existence of small schools more than they do the larger ones. But even the larger institutions still pose challenges with low enrollment. 

            “Many schools, especially residential schools, operate on a fixed-cost business model, so a 5-percent decline in enrollment can be a really big deal,” said Alana Dunagan of          the Clayton Christensen Institute. 

Another reason why large institutions are being negatively affected by low enrollment is that they cannot easily reduce their debt service on buildings or cut back on administrators. Many public universities are massive organizations and it takes a great deal of money just to keep the lights on, yet alone pay people’s salaries. Some universities have turned to hiring adjunct faculty as a way to save costs and now adjunct instructors represent more than 40 percent nationwide. Universities, in the past, could also count on State funding to give them the resources to build, grow and invest in the future. However, this is not the case today. State funding continues to be cut and many State Institutions receive less than 40 percent from State Appropriations. It becomes and endless cycle of lower State funding can lead to lower enrollment, and lower enrollment results in further reduced funding.

Ms. Shaw explains that student loan debt is nearing $1.4 trillion, and many economists are making the argument that this could be the start of the bursting “bubble” of higher education tuition costs. One key factor to keep in mind is that the country has pulled out of the Great Recession, and employment is booming. This results in some students—especially adults—may be working instead of going to school. Although the booming economy theory may count as a factor to understanding low enrollment numbers there are other and more complex factors that need to be considered. For example, community colleges are seeing big declines, where enrollment has fallen by 16.6 percent since 2011, and according to Dunagan, 

            “…the biggest change in enrollment numbers is coming from adult students going back to work, not from traditional-aged students.”

Dunagan goes on to point out that businesses dropped a lot of training during the recession, are returning to providing training, which reduces the need for outside education. 

The most alarming indicator of continued low enrollment might be the link between demographics and cost. The number of 18-year-olds enrolling remains steady, but these numbers do not reach the doubling numbers that institutions experienced in the past 40 years. There is a dramatic decline in collage age populations in many parts of the country. For example, college-age populations in the Midwest, and New England, are declining and the schools in these areas will not have access to enough local students to fill the classrooms.

Richard Vedder published an article n 2018 for Forbes Magazine, entitled, “Why Enrollment is Shrinking at Many American Colleges." Vedder compares how the industrial revolution resulted in the depopulation of rural communities as people moved to the cities for to take advantage of employment opportunities.  Today where, “academic villages” are suffering due to migration, where faculty migrate to more promising communities or back to the workplace. He supports his argument with a litany of academic closures and lay-offs. For example, he states that Western Illinois University announced the layoff of 24 faculty members, some tenured, as well as eliminating 62 unfilled positions. He goes on to say that this downsizing will not end with these layoffs. In 2013, 11,700 students attended this university, and the expected total enrollment this fall suggests only 8,000-a decline of 30% in five years. A similar story is repeated at Southern Illinois University where enrollment has decreased at the Carbondale campus from 24, 000 in 1990, to less than 15,000 today.

            “One might assume this is all a consequence of Illinois's dysfunctional state government, which has sharply reduced its support of the schools cited above. But it is a national phenomenon. A seven-hour car ride northeast from WIU's Macomb campus brings you   to the home of Eastern Michigan University (EMU). Enrollment, more than 25,000 in      1990, is around 21,000 today. A few hours’ drive to the southeast, at the University of           Akron, enrollment fell from almost 30,000 in 2011 to 23,114 in 2016, a decline of more   than 20% in five years.” Said Vedder.

Enrollment declines have impacted the Midwest the most, but this is part of a national trend. For example, the 2018 enrollment at the University of Central Oklahoma was around 14,000-down 10% in four years. The same pattern of falling state support and decreasing enrollment puts greater pressure on the institutions to survive. The same pattern of lower enrollment yielding lower state funding is being repeated throughout the country, and for many institutions this cycle is the beginning of the end.

Art and Design College closures are at an all-time high and the future survival for many of them does not look optimistic. Hallie Busta article in Education Drive entitled, “How many colleges and universities have closed since 2016?” Points to increased regulation and falling enrollment as contributing factors for closures of hundreds of campuses around the country. As some colleges close their doors they are absorbed by larger institutions. Some other art and design colleges are creating new majors and dropping programs that have low enrollment. The hope is that they can attract students who might normally consider attending art school to these new majors. This can be a risky strategy because there are no guarantees that students will enroll in these new majors or these new majors may attract students who would have normally attending existing majors. The results can be low enrollment in all majors, both existing and new.

            “…more than 50 for-profit colleges that closed, were acquired or consolidated since 2016. Among them are chains such as Brown Mackie College and ITT Technical Institute, which together operated more than 100 campuses across the country, meaning the count of affected locations is much higher.” Busta commented.

Some colleges are trying to attract students by offering more online courses, and the hope is that new students will be attracted to online courses and that will increase enrollment numbers and hopefully they will survive. 

Whatever strategic plan that colleges try to put in place to combat low enrollment is nowhere near enough because the decline has been happening for a long time, and many colleges failed to react or understand.Busta explains the history and timeline of the seeds of low enrollment where she compares how governmental oversite and accountability lead to many institutions collapsing.

            “the for-profit sector has been in a downward spiral since 2016, when the Obama     administration increased its oversight and stripped federal recognition of the accreditor responsible for two large chains—ITT and Corinthian Colleges—whose high-profile collapses drew attention to issues of misrepresentation and poor student outcomes within the sector. That accreditor, ACICS, oversaw about 250 colleges in 2016, a figure that has since shrunk by roughly two-thirds with 61 closing and more than 100 finding new accreditors, according to a July 2018 report by the Center for American Progress.” 

Between 2016-17 and 2017-18 more than 100 for-profit and career colleges closed, while 20 nonprofit colleges closed during the same period.

Disappearing Middle Class

The UN Millennium Report predicted that if the world socio-economic trends to not radically change then the future will have a small world super-rich class, a large world poverty-class and a small and disappearing world middle-class. This report’s predications are more important today than when I first began writing about it 18 years ago. As the world’s middle-class continues to shrink then so does upward mobility and without the ability for people to move up then the need for higher education disappears. The middle-class is extremely important to art and design education because they are the ones that support and believe in the importance art and design play in society. 

In March 2018, Patrick W. Watson published an article in Forbes entitled, “The Middle Class Might Nearly Disappear In The Next Decade.” He had attended the Strategic Investment Conference that same year and listened to the keynote titled “Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation, and Inequality.”The keynote predicted that a combination of a demographically shrinking workforce and increasingly cost-effective automation will aggravate inequality, curb demand, and put a cap on economic growth, and this will have massive social and financial implications for the next decade.

He goes on to say that someone will have to buy these goods that robots produce, and as the middle and lower classes suffer, spending will decline. The result will be “demand-constrained growth, and it will get much worse and not just in the U.S. Many won’t initially notice because rising productivity will mask some of the job losses. But eventually, job losses will overwhelm productivity.

In December, 2015, The Pew Research Center published, “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground: No longer the majority and falling behind financially,” Stated that, after more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point.

            “Over the same period, however, the nation’s aggregate household income has   substantially shifted from middle-income to upper-income households, driven by the     growing size of the upper-income tier and more rapid gains in income at the top. Fully     49% of US aggregate income went to upper-income households in 2014, up from 29% in      1970.” 

Middle-income Americans have fallen further behind financially in the new century. 

            “In 2014, the median income of these households was 4% less than in 2000. Moreover, because of the housing market crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-09, their median  wealth (assets minus debts) fell by 28% from 2001 to 2013.”

The disappearing middle class is something that private and public institutions could do something to address. For example, they could both invest in improving in communities that are disappearing. They could create opportunities for faculty and students to develop innovative businesses and projects for these communities to reinvent themselves and hopefully counteract the effects of globalization and shifting economies. The hope would be that having dyeing communities reinvent itself might begin to increase the middle-class. These types of community and academic partnerships cannot be the kinds of experiences where institutions travel to communities, have a wonderful experience, take a lot of photographs, and have the experience culminate in an exhibition of theoretical projects that have no intention of being implemented. These experiences do nothing to improve the socio-economic futures of those communities and will not strengthen the middle-class.

The Private Educational Model

Private art and design education have the ability to be nimble, reactive and respond “relatively” quickly to change. They also tend be outward thinking and see the importance of thinking and engaging globally. Their administrators, faculty and students travel the world and are committed to engaging in and with different cultures. 

The private educational model supports the belief that the have faculty that are grounded in practice and that practice is relevant. It is the idea that artists and designers learn from making and that making is also essential to becoming an educator. The instructor who is grounded in and continues to sustain a practice will always be an inspirational educator and innovator.

The relatively small size of private art and design colleges allows for easy access to the academic leadership. It is relatively easy for students, faculty and staff to get access to the college president because they see the president every day walking around the building. Many presidents are known by their first name, and it is precisely because of this ease of access that ideas can be shared freely and immediately. This access is essential to be able to make rapid decisions. On a personal note, I have had, and continue to have, wonderful relationships with the Presidents of the four private institutions that I have been proud and honored to have served with.

Private colleges tend to invest in new buildings and innovative classroom spaces as they see these investments as becoming catalysts to engage and recruit potential students. The hope is  that when students, and their parents see these buildings and interior spaces that they quickly picture themselves in these inspirational spaces. Other colleges have imbedded design studios within the academic experience to offer students professional experiences. These internal design studies because they offer students internships, paid part and full-time positions. These studios creative output range from producing work for non-profits, promotional material for the college and, in some cases, developing projects for national and international humanitarian causes. One should applaud these types of endeavors because they certainly provide students with wonderful educational experiences. These design studios also give the institutions the competitive advantage over their peers. What is unclear is if the investment in new buildings, and innovative classroom spaces are that going to be enough to increase enrollment and cover the investment. What they tend to do is that with each new building they increase tuition. It is also unclear what the funding model is for the internal design studios. For example, what do they charge for their services, and does this amount undercut the design profession, and if they are undercutting the design profession are, they taking potential projects away from design studios because they are offering a cheaper service? And finally, do these studios offer a true learning experience for students, and do they have an open and transparent relationship with departments to ensure learning outcomes and objectives are being met.

Many private institutions try to counteract the high tuition costs by offering scholarships, technological incentives and by partnering with community colleges and allow those students to transfer in with junior-standing. The transfer balance is tricky because if more students are transferring in as juniors than those students who enroll as freshmen then the college is losing two years-worth of tuition with every transfer student.

As tuition costs continue to increase then more families will not be able to afford to send their children to private art and design school, and more and more students will decide to look elsewhere to study because they do not want to carry a high debt load when they graduate.

Many private art and design colleges are small-scale and have a narrow focus. The small scale means that an average student undergraduate and graduate student population might be less that 3,000. And the narrow focus comes from they cannot offer true interdisciplinary experiences to their student’s and neither can offer a them wide selection of humanities and liberal arts courses. Obviously, there are always exceptions to the norm as some of the largest private colleges have  been able to build relationships with nearby and excellent universities, and their students can take advantage of taking their academic courses there.

The private institution’s understanding of interdisciplinary education is placing art, graphic design and  industrial design students in the same course, and that is effectively preparing students to function in an interdisciplinary world. What is difficult, if not impossible for these institutions is having  engineering, graphic design, political science, industrial design and business students all enrolled in the same course. And this course provides a true interdisciplinary experience because all students learn from each other. They begin to understand alternative ways of thinking, as well as different approaches, and in these situations,  students learn faster and deeper through peer-to-peer relationships. 

The Public  Educational Model

If the mantra of private art and design is learning through making, then the public mission is research is king. Private art and design faculty conduct research around the world, and many of them are helping to shape and improve communities. They also expand the body of knowledge of art and design as well as bringing university, state, national and/or international funding to help support their research. The faculty research and the research dollars are extremely important to the college and university because of the prestige it brings, and because the funding takes some of the financial burden off the institution. The institutional burden is reduced because first, the university and secondly, the college, take “administrative” percentages from the grant, and the larger the research amount then the larger the administrative fee becomes. 

Research is also important because it comes back into the classroom and helps to define and shape the students’ educational experience, and in some cases,  students actually assist faculty with their research. Research funding can also allow faculty to “buy-out” courses. The buy-out means that they reduce the number of courses they teach, and when a faculty buys-out a course then that course still needs an instructor to teach it. Institutions who are located in large population cities have an easier job because they have a large pool of potential candidates to draw from and offer adjunct teaching positions. Institutions who are located in either small towns or in remote locations have a much more challenging time finding someone to teach, and the courses are taught by graduate students. Research can also take the form of corporate sponsored projects. A sponsored project can mean that a corporate sponsor will pay to have faculty and students conduct research on one of their projects or experiences or ask students and faculty to produce a tangible solution.

Public institutions are massive and complex systems that can have their own power plants, internal police forces, healthcare facilities, transportation systems and multiple recreational buildings. Faculty can even rent a vehicle from a fleet of vehicles and take students on field trips or travel across the country to conduct work.

The problem associated with scale is cost, and private institutions have look to the state to help offset costs and invest in the educational experience. State financial support to higher education has been seriously in decline for many years and the lack of funding is affecting public education at a deeper rate than private education. State funding to public institutions has been on the decline for many years and recent predictions indicate that this trend will continue. One could argue that many public institutions are really operating more like private ones, and the word “public” remains in name only. 

In the 2018 Michael Mitchell, Michael Leachman, Kathleen Masterson and Samantha Waxman article for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities entitled, Unkept Promises: State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Access and Equity.” Shared the how public education has changed. They went on to say that past generations of students believed that if they worked hard and strived, that public colleges and universities would serve as an avenue to greater economic opportunity and upward mobility. That view has with today’s students, where the cohort is more racially and economically diverse than any before it seen that promise is fading.

They say,

            “Public higher education is no longer “affordable” and tuition increases are an attempt  to fill the void created by the decrease in State Education.”

They go on to say that the change has occurred because rising tuition threatens affordability and access leaving students and their families, including those whose annual wages have stagnated or fallen over recent decades, either saddled with onerous debt or unable to afford college altogether. 

            “Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges in the school year ending in 2018 was more than $7 billion below its 2008 level.”

Jeffrey j. Selingo’s article in theWashington Post on September 8, 2018, entitled, “States’ decision to reduce support for higher education comes at a cost.” makes a compelling argument of how many state universities are missing from the U.S. New and World Report, the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education ranking reports. State universities do rank in the top 20 and what is more disheartening is that 8 out of 10 undergraduates attend a public college or university. 

Selingo explains that,

            “…state lawmakers now see higher education as a private good that should be     supported by students rather than as a public good underwritten by the states.”

And he goes on to explain that public institutions were not always ranked so low. For example, in the late 1980’s, eight of the top 25 national universities in the U.S. news rankings were public, compared with three today.

Public universities dropping in ranking is partly to do with the lack of state financial support, but there are also other factors. Public Institutions are a bureaucratic nightmare, and the larger the institution the more beauracracy there is to wade through. Change at a State University is difficult and rapid and immediate change is nearly impossible. Trying to change the institution is not for the faint of heart. 

The beauracracy is crippling and severely impacts the institutions ability to perform effectively. If we think of the passage of time as a highway, and the further along the highway we travel, the faster we can go and a point is reached where we are traveling faster than the speed of light. The vehicles traveling on this highway are a mix of innovation, globalization, socio-demographics and industry, and each of these vehicles has a subset of other vehicles that are local, national and international vehicles. Every one of these vehicles are accelerating at different speeds and are at different points on the highway. The important point is that they are all moving down the highway and they are all accelerating. On this same highway is public higher education and besides it is public art and design education. Private education is a snail, and that snail is always traveling at the same speed-the speed of a snail. Art and design education are behind the snail, traveling slower and will always be behind the snail. 

Bureaucracy stifles everything and effects everyone, and, for example, if a department wants to add a new or change an existing course then there has to be agreement at the department, college and, in some cases, the university levels. The course proposal passes from one committee to another and each has the authority to make recommendations, pass or deny the proposal. If a new course is “finally” approved then it will take up to “three” years before it can be made available to students. That’s three years of less-than the speed of a snail! If a department wants to create a new major or change the name of a program, then it travels through the same academic committees and finally has to be presented to the Board of Regents to approve or decline. This process can take up to a year to lumber on up through one committee after another. 

The Board of Regents are a state-elected group and have 100% control over any major decisions that impact public education. Both the governor and the board of regents have control on how much state funding will be awarded, and today, many public institutions receive less than 30% in state funding. In this world of educational fiscal decline, many public institutions reach out to corporations for financial support in order to try and close the financial gap made from the lack of state funding. Corporate funding provides the potential for students to gain industrial experience and have a competitive advantage over their peers through sponsored projects, internships as well as having access to the corporate leaders. But there is a cost with institutions developing these kinds of financial relationships with corporations. This is primarily because academia and the public sector often make strange and uneasy bedfellows.  This is because very few, if any, corporations “give” money away freely, and this financial relationship can begin with a benign building being named after the sponsor or can take the form of institutional research supporting the ideology of the sponsors. Institutions can be a stone’s throw away from becoming places that dare not question this research and if those who question leave and those that support will remain.

There is a deeper and more problematic relationship between corporations and state governments that severely undermine education, and that is that corporations look to the states to give them tax incentives to locate or remain in that state. The January 6th, 2019 New York Times article entitled, “As Stores Wiggle Out of Taxes, Towns Bear Brunt” written by Patricia Cohen, explains how corporations are using aggressive legal tactics to shrink their tax bills, and that strategy is costing local governments and school districts around the country hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. 

She states,

            “…homeowners and small businesses will have to pay more or live with much smaller      budgets for police, schools, garbage pick-up and road repair.”

If states are not receiving revenue from corporations then they award less funding to state education and with less funding public universities have to increase tuition. As tuition increases the risk is less students will attend and lower enrollment means the institutions will receive less financial support from the state, and for many states the higher educational system was something that helped define them. People would say that they might not be an east or west coast city, they might not have mountains, oceans and temperate climates, but they did have access to quality higher education. Many states cannot say the same things today about their institutions.

Every financial cut that comes from the state is supported with an official response from the administration that they will continue to offer an effective and competitive educational experience to their students. What they are saying is that they will continue to operate the same way with less money, and they will recruit academic leaders by offering them less money as well as improving the educational experience by not improving facilities. Who can do more with less financial support—you always do less with less. One fact is true, that with continued financial cut-backs in state funding and corporate investment continue to increase then public institutions will function the same as private ones, and the “public” will remain in name only.

Public institutions believe in transparency and it is the belief that transparency will make them accountable. Everyone’s salary is part of that transparency and that comes with a cost. For example, potential students and parents can compare the salaries of the art and design faculty to, say, the salaries of the engineering faculty, and the faculty salaries could be an indication of how the university understands and rewards importance as well as being a reflection of how the profession rewards its employees.

Conclusion

The final nail in public and private education’s low enrollment numbers is the growing in popularity of vocational and community colleges. More and more students prefer the latter because it costs less and yields immediate employment without any debt.  In October 29, 2018 Allie Conti’s report for VICE entitled, “The Hot New Gen-Z Trend Is Skipping College.” Explains how, for decades, technical and vocational schools have been falling out of favor, as more and more people opt for getting advanced degrees at four-year colleges. 

Conti goes on to say,

            “But recently, with the job market over-promising and underpaying, the trend has           begun to reverse: States have started to reinvest in trade schools. And the generation inheriting volatile job prospects, a gig economy, and contract pay is following suit.”

Generation Z are more often turning to trade schools to avoid the skyrocketing student debt crisis and hone skills that translate directly into jobs, from electrical engineering to cosmetology. The power of trade unions has dwindled, and societal value still favors more elite professions, young students are finding themselves drawn to stable paychecks in fields where their skills can be utilized immediately after graduating, and graduating in a much shorter time than if they had attending a public institution.

Conti explains that, in-state tuition and fees at public four-year schools have increased at an average rate of more than 3 percent above inflation each year in the past decade, according to data from the College Board. Experts say that’s partly a result of a sort of amenities arms race, in which schools use expensive construction projects to lure applicants. That cost—in combination with factors like increased demand and lack of state funding—is then passed down to the customer, in this case the student, and the situation has resulted in the average graduate walking away with almost $40,000 in debt.

In this world of academic uncertainty for art and design higher education both private and public education are responding effectively in some ways, but for the most part they are either responding ineffectively or doing nothing at all. Both public and private institutions have the choice to recruit leaders that have the vision, leadership skills and ability to take the necessary risks to put the institutions on a much needed and essential path of recovery. 

 Institutions who are located in low populated or decreasing populated states will be more vulnerable that those who are located in large cities and/or in states with high and increasing college-age populations, and public institutions whose states continue to defund them and cannot make up the funding gap through corporate investment will have lower and lower enrollment. 

Private Art and Design Colleges must create different funding mechanisms if they want to survive. They cannot continue to rely on student tuition as the primary funding mechanism, and the creation of student scholarships is a small, yet important, step in the right direction. The smaller student population numbers in private art and design education mean they are more vulnerable to decreasing college-age populations as well as the smaller number of families that can afford private education.

Most art and design colleges have quite conservative leaders, and both leaders and faculty tend to be risk averse. For some institutions understand they are at risk and realize they need to change will seek out change agents who can assist them in a transformation or complete overhaul. But before they begin searching for these candidates, they need to ask themselves some tough questions. For example, are really more interested in their own vision for the future or are they really committed to be open-minded to the opinions and strategies of outside agents.  In the past, college presidents, vice presidents, deans, and department chairs have been recruited to bring new ideas to help change the educational direction, and in many, if not all of these cases, they are thwarted as soon as they arrive.  This is primarily because there is a lack of tolerance and understanding for what change looks like and how to make it happen or the change they are seeking is more of the same. Many of these individuals decide to leave or are pushed out. In both cases they go on to better things, and those that remain, remain because they cannot leave. It’s as if there is a small fire in the corner of the building and the solution has always been to put gasoline on the fire to put it out. Someone then shouts out, “Let’s use water instead.” The consensus is to continue using gasoline, and doing more of the same will not save institutions.

There are some simple remedies that can assist public art and design colleges make themselves more attractive to potential students and faculty, and that is they should redesign their websites. This simple, but effective solution would allow everyone to see how design is valued and experienced through the look, feel, design, information and experience. One only needs to compare the differences between public and private art and design websites to get an understanding of the differences between how design is represented, experienced and perceived. Private art colleges seem to understand how the design experience is conveyed to the “customer,” and they can rapidly change, innovate and experiment with the website simply because they can-they are not accountable to a higher power. On the other hand, it is far more difficult and complicated for public colleges to redesign their websites. This is because of institutional beauracracy and because if corporate standards enforced by the university. Some private college websites look more like old telephone directories where they have a lot of content and the way the content is designed does not reflect design. It is also difficult for the viewer to either experience and have an emotional connection. 

It has become apparent that “experience” will become more and more important to defining art and design education, and those private and public institutions that can define their experience and demonstrate their competitive advantage will survive.

These institutions have a clear choice to make. They can either continue to operate the exact same way as they have always done or embrace a risk/rewards vision and live to survive for one more year. For those who do not have the ability to change either because they are inept or incapable will certainly go the way of the dinosaurs. This is an academic Titanic that has already hit the iceberg and rearranging the deckchairs will not prevent the inevitability.