Is design education broken?
Between lagging four year schools, overpriced bootcamps, and cookie cutter online courses, design education is a mess. Why?
I know this thing is called Degreeless, but I have a 4 year degree at a state school in a design program. I didn’t go to an art institute. I didn’t go to Prat. I definitely didn’t go to a school in California where Facebook and Google come in to recruit kids. But I did have awesome professors. I’m lucky.
If you’re looking for a program that will teach you how to be a product designer at a four year school, the options are really narrow, if they exist at all. The vast majority of four year schools are not set up to be nimble and adapt to change with the tech industry.
And then there’s bootcamps. Get a job after 10 weeks! Sounds great on paper, and even if the success rate is really high, a lot of people are left lost and confused about how to actually perform their job functions.
Okay but what about online courses? Some of them are great, some of them are a grift purely padding the wallets of the creators. How can you tell the difference? Mostly you can’t until you’ve already forked over the cash. That sucks.
The market is flooded with junior designers with nearly identical portfolios, lacking visual polish and a clear understanding of why the process they took did or didn’t work. And hiring managers are overwhelmed.
Why is design education so hard?
Money.
At some point, the low pay for professors at four year schools becomes cost prohibitive. I’ll spare you all the specific numbers but my hourly rate would exhaust the salary teachers are paid per class in less than a week.
The incentive for a working professional to teach is very low, as a result. It takes a lot of time and effort to do it right, the financial reward is really low, and the bureaucratic overhead is very high. Look, I don’t think teaching a college course should be extremely lucrative, but it should be at least more than what a single student pays for the class, no?
Bootcamps and online course instructors can be compensated very well. Sometimes therein lies the problem. I’ve seen bootcamps costing as much as a full year at a state school for 3 month intensives. If you’re paying $30k for a class you better be able to guarantee yourself there’s going to be a return on that investment or that the class is from an accredited program. That’s a grift, to me.
For them it’s a numbers game. Get as many people in as possible, get them through quickly, on average show some people get jobs, profit.
Online courses are harder to pin down. Some of them are probably underpriced. Many are overpriced or at the very least not that helpful. Free courses also have their own set of problems.
Curriculum
The world often moves too fast for curriculum to catch up. I was mentoring a student and he was explaining his capstone project to me. It was ripe for an exploration into deep fakes and AI technology, but that wasn’t a topic he had considered at all, nor had any professors mentioned it. That’s really unfortunate. Graduating behind the curve after four years of dedicated effort? Soul crushing.
Whether it’s formal education, bootcamps, or online courses, design education also tends to focus on technical skills at the expense of soft skills. In the worst instances, design programs focus on the literal functions of the software. That garbage is free online, as it should be.
So what do you do?
Honestly? If you’re in a design program, be it a bootcamp, a traditional education program, or an online course, you need to be out there exploring and learning on your own.
Here are some things for you to try right now to bolster your own education:
Try everything you can to get an internship.
Design and launch your own simple side projects with no-code tools.
Do freelance. For local musicians, for your local coffee shop, for your friends. Get your feet wet.
Read. Blog posts, books, twitter threads. Read as much about design as you can stomach. Then, start reading about engineers. And product managers. And startups. And business. Product design isn’t just about grids, guides, and type.
Try new products all the time. Watch for what they do well, what they don’t do well. Open the app store and scroll through the top apps often. Look at what the cool kids are chatting about on Twitter. Grow your taste!