Advanced arts degrees even from the top Ivy League don’t pay off after graduation because of meager job-earnings later, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. The result is many arts/film school graduates are saddled with a lifetime of burdensome student loans that they can’t cover from their career earnings, and this reignites the debate over arty versus practical in cinema studies.
The WSJ article cites Zack Morrison, 29, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia in 2018, noting that his graduate school loan balance stands at nearly $300,000. But Morrison has been earning just $30,000 and $50,000 a year as in entry level film/tv jobs, commercial video production and photography. Another example is Patrick Clement, 41, who graduated from Columbia in 2020 and now with $364,000 in loans. But paying back is tough given he gets by teaching film at a junior college and running an antique store.
Of course, universities are supposed to broadly educate, and are not trade schools. So, there’s a debate about striking a balance between art and commerce in curricula. Prospective students face a conundrum navigating those alternatives.
Responses from the universities say that the WSJ analysis that used Education Department data only looks at graduates two years out of school. And most students praise the quality of their education, so the universities deliver in terms of academics. Finally, low-income students tend to qualify for generous grants that don’t have to be paid back.
One characteristic of the film industry is that it has never been oriented to hiring and advancement based on higher-education pedigree. Hollywood is more of an apprentice, work-experience-as-a-stepping-stone and personal networking orientation.
That means young applicants simply need basic undergraduate degrees for low-paying, low-level jobs that are gateways to top industry jobs. So undergraduate students who enroll for advanced degrees in arts and especially film schools are paying for education traditionally not valued by industry after graduation.
Another problem in paying up for advanced education in the arts is that young students may not have an aptitude for their chosen field; all that’s certain is their personal interest. It’s like majoring in basketball, but there is a risk of washing out after graduation in tryouts for professional teams.
One safety net for students is to earn academic credentials or work experience in marketing, finance, administration and other contemporary business roles for these collateral areas in the arts field. The goal is to qualify for practical jobs offer decent compensation in adjacencies to their artistic goals.
However, higher-education arts programs tend to overlook such collateral functions, and instead obsess over production, content development, entertainment sociology and the sector’s history. Film-school curricula don’t put much emphasis on the movie audience, which is strange because Hollywood employers certainly do.
Turn your nose up, if you will, at mainstream Hollywood, but all those glossy comic-book adaptation and formulaic action/adventure films generate a lot of jobs and high pay.
Employment Reality
Another problem is film schools and fine arts education programs tend to glorify the independent film sector with its edgy and raw movies. But its artistic orientation aside, the indie sector is always hardscrabble with relatively few jobs and lower pay — compared to mainstream Hollywood. Turn your nose, up if you will, at mainstream Hollywood, but all those glossy comic-book adaptation and formulaic action/adventure films generate a lot of jobs and high pay.
Movie sociology and philosophy expertise are key qualifications for film curator jobs and teaching, but those are few and tend only to go to Ivy Leaguers and others with prestige academic pedigrees. With the revolt over student debt, teaching doesn’t look to be a growth category. The numerous film festivals around the country need curators, but most of those jobs are low paying or even volunteer work.
On the student debt crisis, the WSJ article — which is written by Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller — notes that the federal Grad Plus Loan funding program has no limit on how much students can borrow and charges up to 7.9% interest — high in today’s rates-near-zero world. Thus, if job prospects are bleak, it’s easy for students to stay in school to get another academic degree, which runs up their loan total. “The no-limit loans make master’s degrees a gold mine for universities, which have expanded graduate-school offerings since Congress created Grad Plus in 2005,” says the article.
The federal government seems oblivious as well as complicit in the student loan debt crisis. When private-sector bankers gave testimony in Congress in 2019, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee berated the bankers for not doing more on college-loan forgiveness. The committee chair Maxine Waters, in Congress since 1993, was unaware that private banks had been pushed out of student loans a decade earlier. So, the federal government — the organization in which Waters is a leader — is the big-money culprit in the student loan debacle.
It’s a big financial program. The federal Grad Plus loan program issued $11.2 billion for the school year that ended in 2020. Taxpayers are on the hook for losses while universities that collected tuition monies are not.
“Universities, which receive their tuition up front, have an economic incentive to expand graduate degree programs and face no consequences if students can’t afford to pay the federal loans after they leave,” says the WSJ article. “Columbia University film program graduates had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master’s program in the U.S.”
Tuition costs aint what they used to be!
The WSJ article found 43% of graduates with advanced arts degrees from Ivy League schools hadn’t paid down any debt or were behind in payments two years after leaving school. And student loans are not discharged in personal bankruptcies, so graduates who go through personal bankruptcy for a myriad of reasons will still be burdened with college debt.
Each Ivy League school has a multi-billion-dollar endowment — a permanent pot of money — and still charge significant tuition that saddles some of its students with debt. Again, low-income students get aide not requiring repayment and in June Yale University’s drama school announced it would eliminate tuition, due to a donation from a wealthy individual.
A New York University grad school alum who earned an advanced degree in film decades ago that the author knows recalls that tuition used to be much lower in the past so less post-grad financial pressures. Also, “the advisers I had certainly made it clear that this was not a golden path to riches,” the grad recalls.
Not all is bleak today. The media industries such as movies are seeking youthful hires — finding they are digital natives conversant in the electronic-gadget society. And there’s a boom in making content — employment is strong aside from the pandemic disruption — as videos streamers stoke production of original programming. Again, these avenues emphasize contemporary culture, street smarts and feel for the audience, and not esoteric fine arts.
The author of “Marketing to Moviegoers” recalls an incident that highlights the art versus practical debate. An executive of a specialist movie marketing agency told him years ago that “we no longer hire film school graduates because we’ve found many don’t know much about the movie business.” I was momentarily stunned.
The marketing executives explained that film school graduates were expert in film from a fine arts perspective, and knowledgeable about esoteric nooks and crannies. The marketing agency instead hires college graduates with other majors who are familiar with and connected to popular culture, which gives them a feeling for mainstream entertainment.
For an unemployed college graduate, marketing jobs pay well and are good gigs in a related field that can be later entrée for areas of interest.
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