<p>Art & Design are two different fields/majors, which by reading your post, it seems like you're a little confused about. </p>
<p>Art as a major usually will be listed as Fine art or Studio, and will consist of all three : photography, sculpture and painting. Most all the time, you will have a concentration which again will be either photography, sculpture, and painting.</p>
<p>With design, you have to pick a certain field to major in such as Fashion Design, Interior Design, Product Design, Toy Design, Digital Media, Illustration, Graphic Design, Jewelry Design, Furniture Design, etc. You can't just major in Design, because it would be to broad of a major, and I don't think any school offers just a major called Design.</p>
<p>The creme of the crop of art/design schools is Rhode Island School of Design(RISD). But even then, there are still schools who dominate RISD in certain majors such as Parsons, FIT, Central St Martins and Otis for fashion design. Employers who recruit fashion majors are familiar with these schools, because they are the big fashion schools. And it all depends on the major you're looking to get into that will have recruiters knocking on certain school's doors. Like at Otis, I know that Mattel is one company that recruits for our Toy Design Major, and EA games and other gaming companies for our digital media major, Abercrombie & Target, usually hit up many of the majors within Otis such as fashion, graphic design, and product design. Just by word of mouth Art Center is another school that is extremely good in most all their majors especially in their car design and graphic design majors. I've been to a lot of Illustration art shows in los angeles and most of them come from art center.</p>
<p>You have to know what you want to major in, and know that an ARt/design school is right for you, because the minute you enter an art/design school, your life becomes about art and design, there is no chance to explore other majors outside of the art and design majors. you would have to go to another school for that. and if you honestly have other interests such as business or whatever, what may be best for you is a regular university who has more than just art/design majors such as university of cincinnati, carnegie mellon, university of michigan ann arbor etc.</p>
<p>Alot of regular university have some of the best dept in certain majors, beating out art schools such as Kansas State University or University of Cincinnati for Interior Design. It's all about researching the majors you think you want to get into and seeing what schools are the strongest in them.</p>
<p>Like you said different design majors will get paid more than others like architecture more than a graphic design major. </p>
<p>In my opinion I think there's more of a tendency to relate starving artist to someone who majors in fine arts. by majoring in fine art you're basically saying that you want to do your own thing, and unless someone likes what you're doing and is willing to pay money for your work, then you're basically going to need a back up plan.</p>
<p>When you major in some type of design, your education is being geared towards an industry that wants to hire new designers or fresh talent for their companies. Their is a job market out there for you. But even so what's going to get you a job is your portfolio more than anything.</p>
<p>It's also all about having an open mind, because even if you were to major in something like English at a regular university that doesn't mean that only career options you have are being an english teacher. The same applies to design.art majors, for example a fashion major could pursue being a buyer, a stylist, a designer,, a visual merchandiser, a fashion jornalist, editor, being a Sales Rep, and so many more. Majoring in something isn't so black and white. There's a lot of grey in between, but if you expect everything to come to you, you won't see that, you have to pursue what you want, even if it's an internship, a job, or your major.</p>