When Art School Became Something You Could Buy

Art and design education, class and the changing meaning of admission

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Art school has always offered more than occupational training. It gives people time to experiment, encounter unfamiliar ideas and discover what kind of work they want to make. That freedom is one of its strengths. Yet it acquires a different meaning when entry into an expensive institution is sold through the attractions of a city, a social world and a creative identity, while the cost of participation determines who can afford to explore. The question is whether parts of art and design education have moved from being places in which people develop a practice towards becoming places where they can purchase the experience of belonging to one.

There is no evidence that art & design students as a whole are predominantly affluent, nor that wealthy students generally enrol because art school is fashionable. The evidence points to a more specific process. Prestigious creative education is socially stratified; preparation for admission has long been unequally distributed; some providers now offer routes requiring less evidence of prior creative practice; and parts of the private sector explicitly market the experience of studying design as a desirable way of life. Together, these developments make it possible for education…