<p>Hi there! I was accepted into both Yale & RISD and choosing one over the other will be one of the HARDEST decisions I will make. </p>
<p>Obviously for the arts, RISD is amazing. Amazing faculty, amazing facilities. It really really pushes all of its students. </p>
<p>The thing is, Yale will have more options for me to take other classes. </p>
<p>But does Yale's Art program compete with RISD's?</p>
<p>Yale, of course!!!</p>
<p>Still not answering my question.
I am really concerned about the level of studio art…</p>
<p>Yale and RISD are always tied for #1 for their Fine Art program. Other than that I don’t know much and I’m curious too…
You’d think that with such a strong art program they would promote that aspect more.</p>
<p>I know an art major and a prospective art major, and they both seem really happy here at Yale. As far as I know, Yale has excellent arts programs…</p>
<p>Pardon my saying so, but this is a really dumb question.</p>
<p>RISD is an art school. It’s one of the best in the world, and people come from all over. Everyone there lives, breathes, and sweats art 24-7. People there are building careers as professional artists. There are something like 350 studio art majors per class, plus another 80 or so grad students per class. It has some gen ed requirements, and I believe you can take the occasional class at Brown (which is essentially adjacent), but you go there to study the practice of art, period. And there’s probably no academic institution anywhere in the world that’s better for that.</p>
<p>Yale is one of the great research universities in the world. It has a studio art program on both the undergraduate and graduate levels that is well-regarded. There are about 20 majors per year, many of whom will be double-majoring in another academic subject. (Some of them may even be pre-meds, like the only studio art major I knew at Yale. Who loved it, by the way.) Some of them may become professional artists, but most won’t. When the art majors aren’t working on their art, they spend most of their time with non-artists, and they spend lots of time taking non-art academic classes (which are among the best in the world).</p>
<p>In other words, if you want to go to art school, RISD is the greatest and Yale isn’t in the running. If you want to pursue fine arts within the confines of an academic, liberal arts education, then Yale is the greatest and RISD isn’t really in the running. If you can’t choose between the two . . . tough noogies, you have to choose, because they really are different models of education. They may lead to the same place, but by very different paths, and frankly it’s more likely that they don’t lead to the same place.</p>
<p>Thank you for the thoughts.</p>
<p>I <em>know</em> they are two very different institutions. Which is why I am having such a hard time deciding. </p>
<p>I know I can live and breathe art. I did so for 5 months. In the bitter cold. </p>
<p>I also know I can thrive in an academically challenging environment. I went to a highly competitive boarding school in the East Coast. </p>
<p>I just don’t know a thing about Yale’s art programs, classes, majors, etc. I know I do not want to spend my time at a school that does <em>not</em> have good art facilities. I know I do not want to spend my time at a school that offers no liberal arts. ( RISD actually does - 1/3 of all of your classes must be liberal arts).</p>
<p>Also, I know Yale’s academic classes are amongst the best in the world. Obviously. 
</p>
<p>JHS, thank you for telling me that your art major friend loved it. My mom had a very dear friend that initially majored in art, but he transfered out because he absolutely hated it. I was also reading the Yale Daily News & a girl who graduated in '06 said, though she had a good experience (as an art major), she felt that she was <em>not</em> challenged enough because many students in her classes were non art majors so her teachers did not have such high standards. </p>
<p>One of my main priorities is the experience. Which school will I be happiest at? Which school will feel like <em>home</em> to me? Which school will help me thrive?</p>
<p>I have visited both schools more than once and feel comfortable at both.</p>
<p>
No one on a message board can answer those questions for you, except to say that both schools help thousands of students thrive, but for the most part they are different sorts of students thriving in different sorts of ways. The overlap on the Venn diagram is very small. You happen to be in it, but you are going to have a hard time finding other people whose experience is relevant and recent. For example, my friend’s experience isn’t – first, she graduated 32 years ago, and second, she knew from Day 1 she wanted to be a doctor, not an artist. Can you call Matthew Barney? (But he graduated more than 20 years ago . . . )</p>
<p>Anyway, Yale differs from many other elite research universities because it has a vibrant, respected MFA program in visual arts. Of course it has good art facilities and faculty. (Look into Harvard’s art facilities and permanent faculty if you want a baseline for contrast.) But that’s not the same thing as having arts practice being the very essence of the institution’s reason for being. And, yes, artists at Yale, while accepted, cherished, and supported by the wider community, are always going to be a tiny minority there. That’s what I was getting at by citing the numbers above. If you need dozens and dozens of colleagues, and a wide choice of faculty, you won’t find them at Yale. (And if you think you are going to get the same academic experience in a RISD liberal arts classroom that you would at Yale . . . well, ha ha, you should definitely go to RISD then.)</p>
<p>As for living and breathing art – congratulations on the 5 months, but that is nothing compared to the rest of your life. It’s a semester, basically. It’s important to use that experience to help you decide what you want to do, but it doesn’t prove anything other than you could do either.</p>
<p>As someone who was in a similar predicament, I will say that Yale’s art program is comparable to RISD’s. Of course, RISD offers more breadth in terms of faculty and courses, but, at the undergraduate level, all of your illustration, design, drawing, and painting courses are available, well-taught, and will help you improve just as much as being as RISD will. </p>
<p>That said, the art courses here don’t last quite as long as they do at specific art schools – we’re talking 2-3 hour chunks for drawing courses, as compared to half the day at specific art schools. I feel like the project load is lighter and the work less stressful. </p>
<p>Moreover, the Yale art school boasts one of the top MFA programs in the country and produced some pretty big names in the art community: Chuck Close, Marco Rothko, Maya Lin, etc. and.</p>
<p>The real difference is strictly environmental. As posters above have noted, you simply won’t be surrounded by art majors at Yale the same way you would be at RISD, but that could be a good thing. Diversity allows you to take very interesting academic courses and lets you make friends across many different fields, both of which will enrich your college and future experiences.</p>
<p>JHS - I realize that I will “have a hard time finding people whose experiences are relevant and recent”, and don’t expect others to make <em>my</em> choice for <em>me</em>. I just want to know more about Yale’s art program since I could not find a lot on their website.
Obviously I am not equating RISD’s liberal arts with Yale’s. I just meant RISD <em>has</em> liberal arts classes, & requirements (plus they are very close to Brown so I could also take Brown classes).</p>
<p>The Ascendancy - Thank you for the post. I have been in contact with many current Yale undergrad artists & it each piece of information I manage to collect is so helpful. :)</p>
<p>Well, at RISD, you can cross register with Brown, and RISD has many more options in art. Also, I believe (but I may be wrong) Providence has a lower crime rate than New Haven. I live in RI, and both locations are nice. I’d say it depends on the financial aid. : )</p>
<p>While it’s true that RISD students can cross register at Brown, my suspicion is that you won’t find yourself taking many (if any) Brown courses.</p>
<p>Again, I think the ultimate decision here is the kind of school you want. Yale most likely has very good art facilities–pretty much all of its facilities are good. But if you go to Yale, you’ll probably take no more than half of your courses in art. You’ll have pretty significant distributional requirements in other areas. But it will keep your options more open–so if you decide as a sophomore that what you really like is political science or English, you can change your major. That can’t really happen at RISD. So how sure are you about majoring in art, and how focused on art do you want your education to be? My son faced a somewhat similar decision in deciding whether to apply to a music conservatory or to a BA program in a university…he ended up going for the BA, but he recognizes that he’d be getting a lot more music at the conservatory.</p>
<p>I just want to comment on TheAscendancy’s alumni list:</p>
<p>Mark Rothko – Was an undergraduate at Yale for two years in the 1920s, at a time when I believe Yale did not have any art courses. He didn’t start making art himself until several years after he dropped out and went to work in the fashion industry. At Yale, he mainly hung out with his childhood friend, seminal law-and-economics scholar Aaron Director.</p>
<p>Chuck Close – a legitimate product of Yale’s MFA program.</p>
<p>Maya Lin – her career began with a bang while she was still a Yale undergraduate, when a proposal she developed in an undergraduate architecture course (and for which she received a B) was selected as the design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. I think she later got an architecture degree (not an MFA) from the YSAA, but she was essentially already a famous artist when she started graduate school. Lin is an example (if not exactly typical) of how great art can be produced working outside the lines of the professional art world but inside a liberal arts university. I think Yale’s architecture program has higher standing in the architecture world than its visual arts programs have in the visual arts world, although the visual arts programs are certainly respected.</p>
<p>Lin is also the youngest of this set, and she’s my contemporary, north of 50. It may also bear noting that one reason she may have opted for university rather than art school is that her father was an art-school professor and dean, and she had other artists among her relatives.</p>
<p>The student work looks much stronger at RISD. If you are serious and committed to progressing as an artist, go where your peers will challenge you.</p>
<p>“While it’s true that RISD students can cross register at Brown, my suspicion is that you won’t find yourself taking many (if any) Brown courses.”</p>
<p>I’m a student at Brown, and in every one of my classes (except my art classes, which are at Brown but will switch over to RISD in a semester or so) there has been at least one student from RISD. Cross registration is very common, and while it can be a little bit of a hassle to schedule, it is very rewarding according to the RISD students I’ve spoken to.</p>
<p>That said, choosing between RISD and Yale, I’d probably take Yale. I’ve gotta say, Brown is an amazing environment for studying visual and liberal arts at once, and I’d have strongly encouraged you to apply considering your interests, but RISD has always seemed less cohesive/dynamic to me (e.g. talent shows at RISD have low attendance rates and are kind of… lackluster… while talent shows at Brown are often mind-blowing and many times have to turn people away at the door for lack of seats. I realize attendance is in part a function of the quality of the shows, but it also evidences school spirit/senses of community). Yale, on the other hand, boasts an unusually strong sense of community and an astounding, world-renowned dynanicism, both of which I personally find essential to producing serious and rewarding art. That said, there is plenty of serious and rewarding art coming out of RISD.</p>
<p>thank you, everyone, for the sound advice & input. </p>
<p>it really is down to quality of art vs. academic/ college experience</p>
<p>JHS, as usual, has summed things up pretty well. I would add a little texture to his response by noting that Garry Trudeau is another example of an art student (undergrad & grad) whose experience at Yale took him in a totally unexpected, phenomenally influential, and very cool direction artistically.</p>
<p>I would also say that, according to my 2013 daughter, Yale’s undergrad art classes are pretty theoretical. If you are set on making your living in illustration or graphic design, you might not have either the “commercial” portfolio or business network that a same-year RISD student would have–in part because of the more theoretical approach, but mostly because you’ll be too busy taking advantage of all of the uniquely Yale opportunities to spend as much time in the studio as a RISD student will.</p>
<p>As you already know, it really is apples and oranges. The good news is that they are the best apples and the best oranges in the world–so enjoy!</p>
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<p>I lol’d. </p>
<p>But, OP, I understand where you’re coming from: Two of my choices were exact opposites, but I could argue the pros and cons of both all day long. And yes, there are pros and cons to both. There are people who adore each environment. But that doesn’t mean they’re both right for you, and ultimately, after you’ve stopped rationalizing with pro/con lists, one will probably be clear to you as the environment you’re looking for.</p>
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<p>And only you can make that decision. </p>
<p>I can tell you about my daughter’s friend who was all set on going to a music conservatory because she wants very much to have a professional music career. She was admitted to the best ones. She is also very smart and was also admitted to a top ivy (not Yale). She declined the ivy and went to conservatory. Her music education has continued to thrive. But she now wishes she was in a more academic environment with more intellectual stimulation.</p>
<p>Ultimately you have to ask yourself- are you ready to narrow your focus to a specific art/craft at this point and stay with it for the rest of your life? Or do you want to delay that focus until after college?</p>
<p>I am considering applying to both Yale and RISD for their art programs next year. What are your academics? I would like to evaluate my chances.</p>