<p>EastGrad: Hugs to you and your friend. Do not discount Penn. Its Fine Arts undergraduate program is under the radar, but my assessment is that it is a goldmine of talented teachers waiting for more students to discover them. Take a look a the faculty’s work. Their focus is less on the “paint whatever you feel” variety and more on developing technique and marketable skills. Nearly every class and teacher are very highly rated by students. Fine Arts also works closely with the Cinema Studies, Art History, Communications, and Computer Science faculty and Majors. </p>
<p>Note that at Penn, unlike an Arts School or Brown, you have to do classes in diverse fields such as Writing, Comp Sci or Calculus, History, Philosophy/Humanities, Psych, and Hard Sciences/Physics to graduate, so it is a great choice for smart, inquisitive artists who still want to be educated in many subjects. In addition, Philly has incredible resources in the arts (e.g museums, workshops at PAFA and Studio Incamminati). The Brown/RISD, Carnegie Mellon, and other suggestions are also ones to investigate.</p>