Valuable information on the enrollment patterns found at SVA, PAFA, SAIC, and RISD. Many thanks. Do you have access to comparable numbers from the last few years from Parsons, Pratt, and MICA? Is it possible for you to parse out how enrollments in art degree programs in college and university are faring?
I pulled the numbers from US News college rankings, the conclusions of which are suspect but the input data seems reliable. Unfortunately they're only current. It would have been interesting to get comparisons to five and ten years back.
The "Art School Shakeout" article cited data from the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. AICAD doesn't seem to be publishing any such data lately and I wonder why.
How do the economics of RISD work? I understand the Ivy League has a cycle of alumnus > Wall Street > donor > legacy > alumnus etc., that keeps the endowments growing, but how does RISD keep offering expensive art degrees without sending a lot of grads to Wall Street or Silicon Valley?
In a word, Asians. 23% of the student body is classified as Asian, the same as the percentage of whites. On top of that, 33% is classified as "international." 70% of international students are from Asia. If you attribute two-thirds of the international students to the Asians, which is probably too few, you're looking at something like 45% of the student body either hailing from the most economically successful racial minority in America or paying full tuition from abroad.
This is even more the business model at SVA ($49K/year), which is 16% white, 16% Asian, and 54% international.
For the record I don't have a problem with this, though it does make Crystal Williams sound silly when she talks about DEI, which is pretty much all she does. Also it seems inadvisable to pin the fortunes of the school on the economic health of China, but there's probably no other option.
It could be argued that Claudine Gay, however inadequate as an academic scholar, made better sense as head of Harvard than Williams does as head of RISD. That's pretty damning.
Leaving aside that Gay has been revealed to be a scoundrel who plagiarized in half of her scholarly works and smashed the careers of other academics, that may in fact be true. As a generalist university they have more credible options for leadership than a specialty college like RISD, and the people who were motivated to put a black woman in charge of it likely had to settle for a minor poet for lack of options that pertained to visual art. As I've written elsewhere, if representation is key to inclusion, then the push to install a black president and black faculty at a school where nearly every other student is Asian attests either that all non-whites are fungible or that the whole project is a cynical exercise.
Before the lid blew off the rotten stew at Harvard, the Gay appointment as president looked PC but more or less OK, meaning it appeared to make some sense. She was a Harvard product and had previously been Dean there, so she was *supposed* to be qualified. The Williams/RISD situation looks much more dubious on its face, and RISD should have avoided giving such an unseemly impression.
The SAIC situation defies belief, though I expect it's even worse than it sounds for a victim of it. I also expect Tosca was not an outlier in terms of wokeness but of the exhibitionism thereof. I hope Shiran wins her suit and does to SAIC what that baker did to Oberlin. Really, this is beyond appalling.
"It seemed desperately to want to be important, with-it, and cutting-edge." There's been an awful lot of that all over the place--but focusing on what really matters, not so much. It's not just that such a mindset is ultimately pathetic, but that it's inevitably counterproductive in the long run.
Valuable information on the enrollment patterns found at SVA, PAFA, SAIC, and RISD. Many thanks. Do you have access to comparable numbers from the last few years from Parsons, Pratt, and MICA? Is it possible for you to parse out how enrollments in art degree programs in college and university are faring?
I pulled the numbers from US News college rankings, the conclusions of which are suspect but the input data seems reliable. Unfortunately they're only current. It would have been interesting to get comparisons to five and ten years back.
The "Art School Shakeout" article cited data from the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. AICAD doesn't seem to be publishing any such data lately and I wonder why.
How do the economics of RISD work? I understand the Ivy League has a cycle of alumnus > Wall Street > donor > legacy > alumnus etc., that keeps the endowments growing, but how does RISD keep offering expensive art degrees without sending a lot of grads to Wall Street or Silicon Valley?
In a word, Asians. 23% of the student body is classified as Asian, the same as the percentage of whites. On top of that, 33% is classified as "international." 70% of international students are from Asia. If you attribute two-thirds of the international students to the Asians, which is probably too few, you're looking at something like 45% of the student body either hailing from the most economically successful racial minority in America or paying full tuition from abroad.
This is even more the business model at SVA ($49K/year), which is 16% white, 16% Asian, and 54% international.
For the record I don't have a problem with this, though it does make Crystal Williams sound silly when she talks about DEI, which is pretty much all she does. Also it seems inadvisable to pin the fortunes of the school on the economic health of China, but there's probably no other option.
It could be argued that Claudine Gay, however inadequate as an academic scholar, made better sense as head of Harvard than Williams does as head of RISD. That's pretty damning.
Leaving aside that Gay has been revealed to be a scoundrel who plagiarized in half of her scholarly works and smashed the careers of other academics, that may in fact be true. As a generalist university they have more credible options for leadership than a specialty college like RISD, and the people who were motivated to put a black woman in charge of it likely had to settle for a minor poet for lack of options that pertained to visual art. As I've written elsewhere, if representation is key to inclusion, then the push to install a black president and black faculty at a school where nearly every other student is Asian attests either that all non-whites are fungible or that the whole project is a cynical exercise.
Before the lid blew off the rotten stew at Harvard, the Gay appointment as president looked PC but more or less OK, meaning it appeared to make some sense. She was a Harvard product and had previously been Dean there, so she was *supposed* to be qualified. The Williams/RISD situation looks much more dubious on its face, and RISD should have avoided giving such an unseemly impression.
The SAIC situation defies belief, though I expect it's even worse than it sounds for a victim of it. I also expect Tosca was not an outlier in terms of wokeness but of the exhibitionism thereof. I hope Shiran wins her suit and does to SAIC what that baker did to Oberlin. Really, this is beyond appalling.
"It seemed desperately to want to be important, with-it, and cutting-edge." There's been an awful lot of that all over the place--but focusing on what really matters, not so much. It's not just that such a mindset is ultimately pathetic, but that it's inevitably counterproductive in the long run.