US Gov Sues The Art Institutes
polycounter lvl 18
http://www.petapixel.com/2011/09/02/us-gov-sues-the-art-institutes-for-11-billion-fraud/
This makes me so happy, first step in an art degree actually being worth something. stop passing kids just to get next years tuition. if you goto med school and you dont know the parts of the human body you dont get a degree, if you goto artschool and you cant draw worth a shit, in 4 years you will still get a degree, its disgusting.
This makes me so happy, first step in an art degree actually being worth something. stop passing kids just to get next years tuition. if you goto med school and you dont know the parts of the human body you dont get a degree, if you goto artschool and you cant draw worth a shit, in 4 years you will still get a degree, its disgusting.
Replies
heh so true.
But it's kinda like when one drug dealer shoots another drug dealer.
3 months from graduation and I honestly have students in my classes that can't unwrap models.
UVing is too hard, I'll just work on this one character for 2 months and turbo smooth him 5 times and call it done.
but yeah i do agree, Ai seems to let everyone in and many kids drop out or finish the degree but don't know enough/have the proper skills to get into their industries and are stuck paying ridiculous loans
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/
University of Phoenix better watch it's ass.
The lawsuit is about accepting students for the purpose of collecting government financial aid. The evidence are both reasons you stated.
I hear Iceland is lovely this time of year.
Aye iceland is lovely
Eh, edited my post, no one's opinion ever changes from these discussions.
On the other side of the coin, it's really sad that so many US colleges have just become places to sucker idiot kids out of their money, saddling students with fuck tons of unnecessary classes and many places do not slant the education towards finding an entry level job in your field with job placement and proper final projects geared towards portfolio work.
Regardless, the responsibility comes down to the student first and the college a distant second about making the right decisions for an individual's future.
I can see what you are insinuating there and who you are trying to make a comparison with!
i will just say this, every good artist needs to be able to criticize their own work to get better and every patriotic US citizen needs to be able to criticize their own government.
ps. those trillions of dollars goes to the pockets of the billionairs selling weapons used to commit mass genocide all over the world
actually they do, guidance councilors, the most thankless job in the education system. Luckily I actually talked to mine and grabbed up all that free money that's sitting around for students too lazy to actually pursue it. In Florida, most of the money comes from the idiot tax a.k.a. the Lottery.
BRAZIL HERE I COME !
then again that inst too say that going to AI was the reason for it, but it was a contributing factor.
Somalia is a nice change of pace, as well.
Back on topic, passing students along just to get huge tuition windfalls is not exclusive to for-profit colleges. This is a nationwide problem that permeates our entire higher education system.
I'm glad to hear about this, but the cultures of "everyone has to go to college and they all deserve an A" has to go before this will change.
Edit: No matter where you go to school, you're going to get out of it what you put into it (unless you're rich and go to some big-name Ivy league school - then you get a lot more return on little investment of effort).
Same here, and I know there are a lot of us who managed to get good jobs out of AI. The school itself and curriculum weren't very good, but a few teachers, along with my own will to learn helped me get out ahead. The big deal here that I see (not relating to law suit so much), is that the bar is so damn fucking low for kids to actually graduate from these schools.
It was a good experience for me, but that's not to say I didn't see dozens of students getting by on work that would never, ever get them a job in this industry, or really help them expand their abilities in any way. On my way out however, I was seeing these conditions change, and the expectations being raised by teachers for these kids.
I just hope this all resolves itself in a positive way for the schools and the students.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Putting the corp behind Ai on the side for now, and all the bullcrap that goes on with that place (I got horror stories you wouldn't believe), it's still a school. And there are still teachers that really do want to teach that go there. And even... gasp... students that want to learn. So every once in a while you get the "broken clock being right" situation where you combine teachers that want to teach with students that want to learn, and it works. But Ai itself has nothing to do with that. Those same people could have met other places just the same (*cough*Polycount*cough) and did well just the same.
They do, but like you mention it is EXTREMELY under-valued, as high school these days seem to be meant more to churn out teens ready to become worker bees rather than creative individuals. At my high school our required career guidance was little more than another standardized test.
Autocon got out what he put in which is a lot more than what you can say for a lot of the students who attend and fail. It's partly the schools fault for passing anyone who can keep a chair warm but its also a failure on the students part thinking it would be "just that easy".
I agree, hopefully this will be a step toward making a degree worth something.
What I was trying to say.
Keep in mind this was not just for internal review, Alex Seropian and several others from the Wideload team were to stop in on the final day of class. When the time finally came those on the team who didn't give a fuck were given the task of presenting this thing to the people who made Stubbs the Zombie.
What they had was not the very rough prototype we made. It was a Maya playblast of the main character floating and rotating around a bunch of corridors with one or two of my textures on the wall.
They forgot to turn off the viewport HUD. The Wideload guys were exceedingly nice about not pointing out the obvious bullshit in front of them. I sort of tried to hunch over into a shame-ball and disappear.
I'm pretty sure every one of those fuckers graduated.
same situation at my school.
maybe not all of you have heard but it was a big deal down in florida. at the Art institute of fort lauderdale this was made into a BIG deal because one of the students who was majoring in game-art actually picked up stripping after she graduated in order to pay off her loans. generally her work wasnt good enough and the school passed her anyway.
[ame]
she called stripping a field of study
I like how she said she didn’t receive the skills to become successful, I’m pretty sure you, yourself have to work for those :P
Anyways, I worked my butt off at Ai, we had some awesome teachers who pushed us (and I’m very thankful for them), but we had to push ourselves in order to reach our goals and a lot of kids going there seem to think it’s like high school (from what I’ve noticed), take the class, pass it, get a diploma, ta-da “now I’m a super duper awesome artist with mad skills yay!” And that’s just not how it works, got to work for those shinny shinny portfolios outside of classes and push yourself to be the best, the teachers are there to help and to teach the materials but you’re the only one who can make your work shine
I have read some horror stories coming from different branches, so it’s really sad when a passionate person enrolls only to find out that their teachers don’t know anything and teach them from a book while they are learning from it themselves. That’s why I highly recommend talking to the students there to see if it’s a good school. I’ve had friends asking about my Ai and if it’s worth while, and it is because the school has the materials, but they just have to have it in them to live and breath the industry in order to make it
I went to AI Seattle, back in the early-mid 2000's when the industry was booming and the big deal was having a degree to get your foot into the job field (something I now know to be bullshit, but EVERYBODY told my 19-year-old self that).
I had some good teachers and some bad teachers, and lots of well-meaning and competent but not instructionally-talented teachers. Some of them I learned some decent stuff from, some of them I learned how to deal with people who weren't worth your time, and a few I'm still friends with.
There was nothing approaching a cohesive end-to-end curriculum that would prepare somebody to actually set foot into the industry upon finishing. What I later DID discover is that their placement figures were complete lies, and one of the guys that was supposed to help graduates connect with job opportunities was the biggest parasitic waste of flesh I've ever personally met. Mr. Perrine, if you're reading this, fuck. You. I've had NINE PEOPLE who went to AIS personally recount how worthless you were, and how you took credit for hirings that either A) never happened, or more frequently
I had to teach myself how to unwrap, and the concepts of "edge flow", "box modeling", "edge loops", and minor stuff like "silhouette" and "volume" never came up in classes. I've learned more, faster, for free, from Polycount than I did from AIS in 2.5 years for tens of thousands of dollars in Stafford loans.
These days, I tell anybody interested in getting into game art to get a hard art degree from a 4-year college, learn to paint, learn to sculpt, and then pick up the software.
I wish I could get my money back. :poly127:
I went to said AI of Ft Lauderdale and with Said Stripper girl and all that jazz. And I am glad to see this POS school sued for the fraud and tuition it rapped from its locals. Granted I dont feel bad for stripper mc strippy pants because honestly she never worked hard as far as outside of school goes , and since the school had no clear direction of WTF it was doing its students were like all 1/2 assed. The ones who DID make it either got scooped up by the local (and only) studio being shadows in darkness or the rest learned on there own and left that place and went to where the industry is. (Me and a few others)
If I wasnt buddies with a few people and stubborn as hell to get into this field and learned of places like polycount to start my initial networking, I probably would have been stripping to. Or professional Cage fighter or whatever.
[REMOVED]
It seems like there are a lot of factors not being taken into consideration by these people when they decided to pursue their career choices.
Heartless isn't the word I would use. Try and not use sexist remarks so I don't receive any more complaints from some of our female members.
No one laughed.
There's plenty of people who 'made it' in their industry of choice out of an Ai school, but its pretty clear that the majority of them would have done good without it anyway, or just an alternate venue.
Its sad when you hear employers talk about how they instantly turn down any resume with the words "Art Institute of" printed upon it.
And everyones realised how bogus their claims of job placement and pay-scales has been over the years.
The Ai's stiffed a lot of people. I hope the gov forces them to start refunding large portions of those peoples payments as well.
I often just referred to them as 'guided missiles'. Gave them the assignment, the theory, and let them find their own way around that (often they would find really resourceful means of doing things and teach me various shortcuts and such).
The focus of my assignments weren't simply to get the assignment done. But focus on more fundamental skills, like reference searching, anatomical understanding, surface properties, and attention to detail.
I get the feeling what most schools are NOT teaching are 'paradigms', or theories. They emphasize things like 'tech', and programs, which change so rapidly they're practically not worth teaching. Then focus on having them spend significant amounts of time on demo reels in editing packages that they will never need to know outside of that class.
The flip side is, if I had 5 highly unmotivated students, who expected me to motivate them, and take responsibility for their own failings (which some of the other instructors have had to deal with), then this lawsuit could have very well been about instructors like me.
Oh yeah, there are politics/financial motivations to pass students.
If a student takes up a 'spot' in a course, if they 'fail' or are held back, then there's a tremendous amount of money for their 'spot' that is lost from that class.
I didn't let that stop me though. I made shit work for me by working my ass off. I actually got an industry job before almost all my classmates that graduated from the AID. Some never got a job in the game industry, and that was 12 years ago.
I wonder if I can get back some of the money that I wasted going there...
They are money making schemes, not education. Games, film, architecture, all are too complicated for the average parent, or guidance councilor to know anything about, so if you have a shiny impressive campus tour and demo dvd and some stats about 90% placement, those kids and parents will sign a loan.
At that point the parent is relying on the school to "tell them" by way of grades, if it's a good use of their money. If the student isn't doing projects, slacking off, and not attending classes, or just turning in really rudimentary work, the bad grades will let them know, and they can pull their kid, but that would mean an end to the checks, so the schools don't allow it. Teachers who grade harshly aren't kept around. Everyone is passed so that everyone's checks come until they graduate, or their credit dries up.
Plenty of people in the industry know these degrees aren't worth the paper they are written on, it's all about the portfolio, but an 18-20 year old with stars in their eyes and Gears of War on the brain doesn't get to talk to them, so the whole "free market" principles don't get to come into play (even assuming they worked in the first place) because the shitty reputation can never circulate back to the "customers".
Obviously art can't be regulated at the same level legal knowledge or medical anatomy can, but I can tell you from my classes, I could tell which students shouldn't have gone into 80-120k dollars of debt, cause they were never ever going to be industry caliber. That's even assuming they should be allowed to charge so much for an education.
Everything you said is spot on, and I have experienced it both first and second hand, and I went to a state univ. There is a great deal of pressure leveled on educators to pass students. Basically, the only professors who can grade as they see fit are those with tenure.