Have narrowed my offers down to Cal Arts, Parsons and Art Center for Graphic Design but having a hard time deciding! Got decent financial aid for all 3. Drawn to CalArts but need more info to compare the choices. Any guidance or advice? All 3 colleges are very different!
Congrats! Great choices. Cal Arts is one of the top art schools, generally see it ranked higher than the others. But where would you want to work? NY? CA? That might be important info to figure out. It CA go to Cal Arts, if nYC go to Parsons
Just wanted to say congrats! My kid and I are visiting Calarts soon because she got accepted, we are excited to see it. Maybe ask if there is an accepted student insta or something to check out?
Yes, congrats to your student.
Cal Arts and Art Center are both smaller schools.
Cal Arts is a more traditional ‘art’ college and is located in the rather remote Valencia, meaning that for any nightlife, a student would have to drive. Driving to museums and/or cultural events in LA would be a trek.
Art Center is well located in Pasadena, has the best industry reputation and some of the most impressive results from their graduates (think packaging, etc.) ,but has no on-campus housing, meaning that it’s not a traditional ‘college experience.’
Parsons is also very non-traditional, but the student would have NYC at their fingertips with meaningful in internships giving, them a first-job advantage.
Hello, mother of a rising senior/future art major here. Do you guys mind sharing some of your info, how advanced were your portfolios, etc? My son is a good student, good GPA and test scores, but hasn’t taken a ton of art classes. He’s drawn his whole life though (while legit never taking a single drawing class). How worried should we be? Thank you for any advice or info! If you’ve got YouTube channels where you show your accepted portfolio (so many people do!) I would love to see! Thank you and congratulations!
Cal art:
DS had spent 4 weeks there because he was accepted to the CSSSA program. Non of us were impressed with the facility. The buildings were old and run down, some are just trailers. For being such an expensive art school at 56k tuition a year, we expect better facilities. DS said there were not enough equipments for animation. The line to use the cameras were around the corner in the hall and it was very stressful. He also absolutely hated the dorm bathroom. Again, it’s run down, old and badly designed. It never got updated since the 70’s probably. So Ds will not apply there.
Art Center
We visited the Hillside campus during Covid remote learning period. So the campus were empty but we were impressed with projects that were posted. The downside is that the GE and liberal art portion is very lacking. The campus was nice and modern though very small compared to regular universities. Anyway, we visited again recently when in-person classes were in session. A little surprise that majority of students we bumped into were Chinese foreign students. I didn’t know they recruit so heavily overseas. So I did some research, and found this statistics on their website: 43% of the student are foreign students (mostly from China) plus 32% Asian from US kids. We are Chinese American ourselves, so it’s not a racial thing for us. I am more concerned about the lack of diversity issue. As artists, I think you need to learn in a diverse environment where you can learn from different culture perspective. If it’s a very homogenous environment, it’s like working in a bubble. So we are re-thinking about this school.
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Thank you for your thoughtful reply!