HOME | DD

Description
While I'm still in a ranting mood, I figured that maybe it would be nice for me to rant about the thing which has caused me so much stress these past few months and which has made me have something of a midlife crisis in my early twenties.

Where creativity matters, but money matters more.

Anyone thinking of going into these schools should seriously reconsider. Unfortunately for me I didn't have the foresight to do some research on this institution beyond seeing what kinds of programs they offered, and didn't extensively look into other options because "this is it they have exactly what I want this is where I want to go". As already stated in my last Journal, I have another nine months left of my degree when I start back on Monday, and I'm writing this now because, as someone who's been attending this school since Summer 2010, I can honestly say this is thus far the worst financial decision I've ever made.

Rewind to summer of 2010;
I've just graduated high school, am determined to go to an art school and earn a degree, then take that degree in animation and go work with Pixar. Thanks to a biological blip I'm graduating in May at age 18, and will be kicked off my parent's insurance by my 19th birthday in July (and after this had happened with my big sister a few years prior it was a nuisance we really didn't want to deal with again). By this time I'd researched a few local schools (Art Institute included), but none of them offered degrees or courses I was interested in...except Ai. For an aspiring animator, Ai was a dream. So we went to tour the local campus (a thirty minute drive away; hella convenient), we talked to the financial aid people and the student advisors, had a projected schedule and financial plan (grants and loans, everything) for my first quarter there, and by the time I walked out of the office...I was enrolled.

Wait a minute...that fast? These people didn't give me any time to reconsider. I don't remember much about the enrollment process other than the advisors giving out promises of big-money jobs in the industry upon my graduation in Summer 2014, telling me that they would help me find a job in my field for six months after graduation and that it would be easy because of how big a name Art Institute is. At some point I won a $2,000 scholarship, which would have to be used for the summer quarter because, if I'd waited until Fall (October)...that whole deal with turning 19 in July and being kicked off my parents' insurance. So, here I was, not even two full months out of high school and I'm already attending college.

Everything had worked out. I was happy at this new school. It was in reasonable driving distance of home so I didn't have to go into the Student Housing, was in a pedestrian-friendly town (which was good because this Ai doesn't have a cafeteria/food plans), and even had a parking garage literally right next door (we had to pay for parking, but still). I even met my first boyfriend here! What could've been bad about this place?

There was word drifting around the halls of a lawsuit. An $11 billion lawsuit filed against the Institutes by the Federal government, because apparently Ai was guilty of fraudulent reports meant to get more financial aid routed to the school.

I thought nothing of it. I was just so happy to be in this art school, making friends and making art every day that even the "false promises" they'd fed me at enrollment couldn't bring me down. Sometime near the end of my first year my then-boyfriend and I broke up, and this made me focus even more intensely on my schoolwork/art, for the next two years of school until mid-2013, when the Gainful Employment mandate appeared on posters in the hallways.

Art Institute is a for-profit school. They have highly specialized courses with non-transferable credits, even between different branches of the school (as I learned from a transfer student from Texas, who had to retake all his core classes). We were explicitly told the Gainful Employment mandate would ruin the school; make it lose all its accreditation (thereby making our degrees worthless), would eventually shut down the entire Art Institutes franchise and force us all to seek an education elsewhere (remember; non-transferable credits), would cause our student loans to immediately come due, and that the mandate was, in general, "an attack on the arts". The posters in the hallway and the teachers' speeches convinced us all that this was a horrible thing that needed to be stopped, so we all signed an online petition against it. Without question and without doing research. Like sheep.

www.dailynews.com/social-affai…

This mandate wouldn't have shut down the school. It wouldn't have caused our loans to become due. What it would have done is made us seek other, cheaper colleges to attend and severely limit the amount of financial student aid Art Institute could rake in. Remember the lawsuit?

www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/edu…

The mandate would've limited federal funding/student aid disbursement to for-profit schools with "predatory business practices". Ai's accreditation would have taken a hit from the lawsuit, but wouldn't have been hurt by this mandate...IF they changed their enrollment strategy and business practices. And knowing that their student aid department has recruitment quotas to fill each month, this wasn't something they were prepared to do. So they coerced their students into signing a petition instead.

At some point around here one of my friends dropped out. His Parental Plus Loan had been approved in his name, and the school hadn't notified him about it until it had run up into the high four-figures. After about a year of him being approved for this loan, someone finally saw fit to mention it to him. And then he left.

By the Spring quarter of 2014, I was feeling a little weary. School wasn't exciting to me anymore because we were just harping on and on about these programs and skills I already knew, and the classes were getting a little more technical. The teachers were getting more demanding; our sister campus in Dunwoody was the "Main Campus", and the one everyone thought about when anyone mentioned the Art Institute of Atlanta. Our measly little one story campus was something of a sore spot for Dunwoody, so the teachers made damn sure that we would at least be even in terms of prestige. They went about this by loading us down with projects, sometimes up to three full 3D/animation projects in one quarter. Anyone who thinks this isn't a big deal clearly doesn't have any idea how long a 3D project or animation can take. I had already taken a break once in Winter 2014 (January) due to the stress of working on three big projects at once, only to have my computer corrupt them all at the last minute, and the stress of having the teachers refuse to believe my "story". In the middle of the Spring quarter, in early April 2014, my grandmother died, and the stress from both that and three classes, each DEMANDING that I put forward 100% into my projects, made me have such a bad mental breakdown I'm still not fully over it.

Art Institute doesn't like it when its students leave. I withdrew from one of my classes, opting to take a harmless W instead of an inevitable F, and at the end of the quarter, I decided to take another break. The withdrawal process involves getting half a dozen signatures from the administrators, and some of them are less than willing to give them up. For one, I had been given the run-around for a full ten minutes, going back and forth between the same two people at least three times before I finally snapped at one and told them to "just sign this form because he told me to come HERE". She didn't appreciate that much. After that I went to get the Dean's signature, and upon seeing the paper he asked me "are you SUUUURE you want to leave? I mean have you THOUGHT about it at all?". I did successfully get all the signatures I needed, turned it in to the necessary people, and when my break started this past September I felt like a weight had been lifted.

My entire break has been spent doing a whole lot of nothing while I try to get over my breakdown. Sometimes I'd find motivation to do art, most of the time I'd just watch funny videos on the Internet and/or hear a piece of news which would make me angry. More than once I would read an unsavory article about Art Institute's inner workings and wonder if I should go back. The thought of money crossed my mind, but I didn't fully grasp what I had gotten myself into yet. I had already overshot my graduation date of Summer 2014 by six months, and was really just eager to go back, get my diploma, and get out. "I'll be fine, I'll be able to make enough to handle however much I owe. What's another year when I'm this close to graduating?". Against my better judgment I decided to enroll again, and the realization of just how much all of this would cost hit me when I read that I owed $52,283 in federal student loans.

While I was sitting in the lobby waiting for an advisor to call me, chatting with my mom (who'd had to come along because I still don't have a full grasp on the financial side of things (tax forms, FAFSA...)), another advisor came out of his office with a girl and her dad. They were talking about the Housing plans, and how she would have to come back next week to finalize everything. I wanted to start a conversation with them, to see if it was still true that the housing was in an apartment complex two miles away, that there was no free bus service to and from the school, that it would cost $1,000 a month, or if she would have to share a room with three other people. Because this is what they had told me when I enrolled, and I had literally laughed in their faces. "You expect me to pay that?!".

I want to ask this school why they changed the curriculum for all of their programs, with no thought toward how difficult it would make it for anyone who's been here for more than three years to graduate. Why are they introducing all of these new programs we've never heard of, while simultaneously phasing out the ones we've spent upwards of three years training ourselves in? Why does DeVry, which shares a building with us, get free parking but WE don't? You can't honestly tell me that the two 48-inch LED flat-screen TVs in the hallways are a good investment when no one stops to watch them. It's a student art exhibit, how about running the students' demo reels on the TV for longer than two days before going back to your self-promotions? We have enough Macs, how about some new PCs with more than 4 GB of RAM and keyboards whose letters don't stick? Why in the HELL are there new kids in the Student Lounge who are only here until they "figure out what they really want to do" or "just thought this would be fun for a while"? Why do the newbies always take up the Cintiqs for Facebook when I have a final due tomorrow??

Why wasn't THIS around when I started college?!

WHY AM I STILL HERE?!

This school eats your money like Twilight eats hayburgers.
Shun it like you shun the haters.