Is Art One of the Worst Majors for Success?

Kiplinger published the "Worst College Majors for Your Career." And if you're thinking of a major in art, you must take a look at these rankings.

	Worst Major	Unemployment Rate for Recent Grads	Median Salary for Recent Grads	Likely to Work in Retail (Compared to Norm 1.0)
Anthropology	1	10.5%	$ 28,000	2.1
Fine Arts	2	12.6%	$ 30,000	1.8
Film & Photography	3	12.9%	$ 30,000	2.6
Philosophy & Religious Studies	4	10.8%	$ 30,000	2.0
Graphic Design	5	11.8%	$ 32,000	0.6
Studio Arts	6	11.1%	$ 35,900	2.3
Liberal Arts	7	9.2%	$ 30,000	1.8
Drama & Theater Arts	8	7.8%	$ 26,000	2.1
Sociology	9	8.6%	$ 32,000	1.4
English	10	9.2%	$ 32,000	1.4

Note:  the Kiplinger article contains even more data.

Kiplinger's should probably have titled their rankings:  the "Worst College Majors for Finding Jobs and for Making Decent Money."  Only measuring the value of a degree by the money you'll earn is a bit narrow.  Clearly, getting to do what you love for 40 hours a week for 40 years will improve your life happiness.  Yet, you would be a fool to belittle the importance of money, earnings, and job prospects in choosing your major. 

Six out of Kiplinger's ten "worst college majors" include artistic endeavors, ranging from acting (Drama & Theater Arts), to writing (English), and finally to making pretty pictures or 3D things (Graphic Design, Photo & Film, Studio Arts, and Fine Arts).  Majors that do not appear on this list tend to require less math and scientific rigor (with the exception of Anthropology and Sociology, but no science-only major made the list). I think that this absence underscores a rarely mentioned reality about many students who choose the "worst college majors."

First, the majors that made the list are generally easier than many other degrees.  Second, these majors are generally more fun.  Consequently, they attract many students who: 1) can't handle math and sciences, 2) love a good time, and 3) don't really understand what it means to invest in a college education. 

Thus, the Kiplinger's list would probably look very different if we could somehow remove from it the "bad" students – those who resist hard intellectual work (the lazy bums), those who mostly treat college as a great party (the party animals), and finally those who think it's cool to be an artist, but really have nothing to communicate or don't have a deep love for art (the posers).

If you don't recognize yourself in the descriptions above, your ability to succeed in an artistic career after college will look better than the depressing statistic in Kiplinger's study.  While choosing art as a career nearly guarantees more economic challenges than other professions, if you work hard (to be the best artist you can be and to sell your art), society will see you in a better light and generally reward you for it.

The Easiest Art Schools to Discard

A damning report from the US Senate states that the for-profit schools spend more on marketing than on teaching, that their profits matter more than academics, and that recruitment counts more than graduations.  For-profit college spokespeople are trying to hit back hard, saying that all of this is non-sense.

Who should you believe?  Politicians or PR buffoons?

Time for...: COMMON SENSE.

Where does recruitment start in the 21^st century?  Online, right?  If you want info, what do you do?  You Google.

So go check out which schools show up at the top of a search under:  “art schools”

Did the results yield many of the best art schools in the country (such as this list)?  Or did you get mostly for-profit art schools?

Oh!  Maybe you don’t know which art schools are “for-profit.”  Easy.  Just type:  artschools.com (imagine that!  For-profit schools "own" artschools.com).

And what about artschool.com (singular version of “artschools.com”).  A-Ha!  That one is operated by … The Art Institute.  The leading for-profit art school.

Conclusion, that’s A LOT of lipstick on a pig.

So we’ve proven the first point:  the marketing assault of for-profit art schools decimates the marketing presence of non-profit art schools.

Is that enough to discredit for-profit art schools?  No.  Some have great results.  Yet, the best for-profit art schools have invested their efforts in turning out great artists, not in outspending everyone on search engine rankings.

In upcoming posts, I’ll address why most for-profit art schools are a bad investment (and how you can better spend your education dollars elsewhere!).