Elizabeth Goodspeed on the impossible economics of art education in the US

Few educational institutions have been as thoroughly romanticised as art schools. You probably don’t even need to have attended art school to picture what goes on at one: arguments about kerning, three-hour critiques of a monochrome canvas, studio floors splattered with paint (and other substances best left unidentified), bad tattoos and worse outfits, and X-Acto knives as far as the eye can see. It’s a pretty magical proposition, really: a place where for three or four years, your only job is to make stuff and be surrounded by people who love making stuff too.

Unfortunately, self-expression isn’t cheap. For the 2026-27 academic year, the average estimated cost of attending a private art school in the US – assuming roughly 210 days enrolled – is about $370 a day, or $77,700 per year. Given the average US minimum wage of $11.51 an hour, that means it could take roughly 32 hours of work – four full eight-hour shifts – to cover every day enrolled (and that would be before taxes). Of course, most students don’t pay this full sticker price. For example, 85 per cent of students received institutional aid at Parsons, with the average grant aid being $28,600. But even after grants and scholarships, that’s still a couple tens of thousands for a single year of school.

Despite the extraordinary sums students are paying for this education and associated supplies (often from school-owned stores), private art schools are not doing so hot. Since 2022, we’ve seen the closing of the San Francisco Art Institute, Delaware College of Art and Design, and Philadelphia’s University of the Arts – the latter shutting down with just one week’s notice, leaving students scrambling to transfer. At the beginning of the year California College of the Arts announced that it too would close in 2027, 120 years after its founding. According to the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, roughly two thirds of its nearly 40 member schools have experienced declining enrolment since 2019, with very few returning to pre-pandemic levels (many liberal arts programmes could limp along remotely during Covid but no one wants to use Zoom for a glass degree.)

Private art schools have an admittedly difficult business model. Like science and engineering programmes, art education requires specialised facilities and expensive equipment. Unlike high-cost departments at larger universities, however, art schools are less able to spread these expenses across other, less costly programmes. Studio courses also tend to require more instructional hours than traditional lectures and depend on relatively small class sizes – critique 20 students in a row at your own peril – making them more expensive to staff on a per-student basis. Unlike wealthier universities, independent art schools also tend to lack the substantial endowments that can cushion financial shortfalls. While some graduates go on to lucrative careers, I imagine it’s hard to build a robust alumni donor base from a population largely working in fields with middling compensation; besides, the leftist painters who do have a spare $100 are probably more inclined to give it to Planned Parenthood or a mutual aid fund than MICA or SVA. All of these factors compound to make tuition one of the main sources of cash flow for private art schools.

Adding to this general dumpster fire are recent changes to federal student loan policy that seem poised to make paying for art and design degrees even more difficult. Under new rules introduced by the Trump administration, beginning in 2027, degree programmes will be evaluated based on how much their graduates earn four years after finishing school, compared with working adults aged 25-34 who have only a high school diploma. Programmes that fail this assessment in two out of three years would lose access to federal student loans as early as 2028 (weirdly, the test doesn’t account for tuition or student debt at all). Arts programmes are uniquely vulnerable here: one analysis of federal data found that visual and performing arts accounted for more than half of the bachelor’s programmes that would likely fail the new test. This creates a particularly tricky feedback loop where what students can afford to pay for a degree depends on how much previous graduates went on to earn.

As domestic enrolment declines, international students – who are ineligible for federal financial aid and often pay full tuition – have become a financial backstop for American art schools. But studying in the US is becoming less attractive thanks to new bureaucratic hurdles. Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows international graduates to work in the US after finishing school, could soon cost universities $70,000 per student under a new proposal, potentially putting it out of reach for many. Even if OPT remains unchanged, staying in the US after it expires is getting harder: H-1B work visas now favour higher-paid applicants, penalising recent graduates to secure visas through entry-level jobs.

At the same time, aspiring designers have more reasons to stay closer to home. As James Chae reported in It’s Nice That in 2024, the number of Korean students studying in the US fell from 75,065 in 2008 to 43,847 in 2023. Designers who studied abroad in the 2000s have also returned to teach, helping build a generation that no longer needs to leave Korea for a world-class design education. If studying in the US no longer offers a reliable path to working in the US, and local schools are just as good, spending four years (and hundreds of thousands of dollars) to build a professional network in the US makes less sense.

This is usually the point in the article where I would pivot and say something smart about what private art schools in the US, or students considering art school, should do in the face of all this bleak data. I’m sorry! I can’t! Don't hate me! I wish I could just tell more art-loving high school students to attend public universities, but whether that’s a viable option is mostly a matter of chance; though some states have excellent public art and design programmes, your ability to attend one for a lower cost than an equivalently prestigious private institution largely comes down to your ZIP code. Take Virginia Commonwealth University, which has one of the country's most highly regarded public art schools: for 2026-27, the estimated annual cost of attendance is a relatively affordable $44,673 for Virginia residents living on campus (I know the Europeans reading this are sweating right now), compared with $69,413 for out-of-state students. Cheaper than RISD; still expensive. To further complicate things, public universities don’t tend to offer the breadth of specialised majors available at dedicated art schools – leaving, say, an aspiring metalsmith to cobble together a specialty education from whatever vaguely metalsmith-y courses happen to be offered.

People interested in a career in the arts can forgo art school or even university altogether – many do – and given the costs, it’s increasingly understandable why they make this call. But I think a good art education is an extraordinary thing, and it makes me mad that the most financially sensible choice for many aspiring designers is to miss out on it. We generally accept that what someone studies in college doesn’t have to match what they end up doing for a living, yet art school is still treated as a place for kids who want to become artists (or at least don’t want to become lawyers). Half the English majors I know became project managers anyways; why can’t someone study sculpture for four years and then become a project manager too? I know just as many illustration majors who are now working illustrators as I do illustration majors who are now gardeners, nurses or rock climbing guides. Liberal arts degrees are championed for teaching critical thinking and curiosity; surely an arts education provides a similar result. Given that AI is drowning us in generated imagery, it really does seem like a particularly bad point in time to have in-depth visual literacy and handicraft be a luxury reserved for those who can afford private art school.

I fear we’ve become so accustomed to art education being a burdensome, individual expense that we’ve lost sight of the possibility of treating it as a public good. For many of America’s most prestigious private art schools, serving the public was once central to their very reason for existing. RISD was founded in 1877 to train designers for Rhode Island’s burgeoning manufacturing industries; Pratt followed in 1887 with the goal of providing accessible education to students regardless of race, gender, or class – an unusually progressive policy for the time. Though it’s a little hard to parse these original ambitions against what these institutions charge today, some schools still treat access as inseparable from the value of an art education. Cooper Union, established with the goal of being “open and free to all,” charged no tuition for more than 150 years before introducing it in 2014, and plans to become tuition-free again in 2028. And then there's MassArt, which remains the country’s only independent, publicly funded college of art and design.

For a more ambitious model, we could look to the Soviet Union’s Vkhutemas, which offered state-funded art and design education beginning in 1920, and believed that creative work could help build a new society. The US government has of course dabbled in some creative collectivism, too: during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration paid thousands of artists to make art and established community art centres that offered free classes to the public. If the New Deal can inspire AOC’s Green New Deal, why not revive its investment in the arts, too?

I don’t expect America’s private art schools to become public universities overnight. I’d simply love to live in a country where more people could argue about kerning without taking on six figures of debt. A little champagne socialism for graphic design, please!