Art Students' Predicament: Special Skills but Limited Prospects

Lindsay Perkins, a senior at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, carries a grim resignation about her post-college fate. She fears her specialties at the $27,000-a-year private school -- print- and screenmaking -- might not position her well in the increasingly survivalist economy.

With her parents in North Carolina selling stock and withdrawing money from a 401(k) account to help pay for her education, Perkins, 21, figures she might get a job making "I {heart} DC" shirts. Now, she spends most of her energy on academics. Her project on teen angst? She debated for a while between making stylized prints of an image featuring Miley Cyrus or an image of a pack of girls beating each other up. Either way, Perkins, like many other Corcoran students, sublimates her career dread because the thought is too depressing.

"I feel like I have lost my motivation, because I don't know what to motivate myself to do next year. I still think this is an exciting medium, but it reminds me of Polaroids," said Perkins, who nonetheless praises Corcoran and its faculty. "I don't think I personally thought it all through. To some extent, I regret it. I don't know how to put it. I don't regret following my dreams, but maybe I regret the way I went about it. I didn't really set myself up for any place in society."

As many undergraduates fret about graduation, at least one subculture of students in the expensive college landscape is exuding a decidedly morose state of mind: art students. Like many undergrads seeking specialized humanities degrees, student artists wonder what viable place they can occupy in a tightening economy, which now is luring young people into more stable careers in government, the sciences, health care or consulting.

Richard Freeman, a Harvard professor and National Bureau of Economic Research director, said young artists can take comfort: Young bankers are almost on par with them in choosing risky careers. Freeman, though, is hopeful for humanities majors. "If you think of a place like McKinsey consulting, and you come with an art degree, they may prefer you because they're looking for creative thinkers," he said.

At the Corcoran, the only major art school in the immediate Washington region, students say they have always been aware of their path's high risks. But they also believe that the tough economic times and ever-rising tuition should translate into more career guidance -- especially for their disciplines' low-paying careers.

"Are these prints going to be hard to sell?" Perkins said she asked herself one day inside the studio. "I'd like to think they wouldn't be, but it's such a basic topic, and they don't really teach you these things. That's what makes me mad. If I wanted to sell it, what are the steps you go about to sell it? Who are the people you go to, and what are the things you say to them?"

Perkins's professor, Dennis O'Neil, chairman of Corcoran's fine arts department, said he wants to start a course in the fall that will teach self-marketing skills. "Knowing how to write a grant, how to talk to a curator, how to put together an exhibition, how to write and speak about it -- these skills are critical for an artist. But somehow we haven't done it" as part of the curriculum, he said. "Now we're putting it in place."

O'Neil views his students' predicament with a counterintuitive perspective. "Leaving arts school in an economy that's challenging is not really a bad thing," he said. "A lot of people are going to be discouraged . . . but, you know, it reduces the noise level" -- meaning there will be less competition, and that the best and most committed stand to make it.

Nationwide, this generation of student artists, motivated primarily to work in multimedia careers, doesn't seem to care about the long odds: Among more than 30 private art schools, for instance, applications shot up 5 to 10 percent from 2002 to 2007, according to the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. At the 300-student Corcoran undergraduate college, which began granting degrees in 1966, applications were up by more than 100 this year -- the sharpest rise in a decade.

Tuition at the Maryland Institute College of Art, a private school in Baltimore, is $33,000; at Virginia Commonwealth University's art school in Richmond, a state institution, tuition is $18,000 for out-of-state students and about $6,000 for in-state, officials there said. The price tags are offset by the schools' mix of financial aid and scholarships. At the Corcoran, for instance, incoming students this year received an average of $8,200 in annual grants; the school's nearly 3 percent tuition increase for next year is the lowest in a decade.

Still, Lindsay's father, Joe Perkins, said he can't resist sometimes wishing that his daughter had gone to a less-expensive school. Lindsay used to have a cashier's job at Whole Foods, but she quit because working was hurting her grades.

Shahdeh Ammadi, Corcoran's assistant director of student and alumni development, is making trips to New York and Miami to persuade galleries and other organizations to hire Corcoran graduates. She cited upcoming student portfolio reviews by art directors and graphic designers, as well as required internships for photography students, as examples of Corcoran's focus on careers.

Still, she said, some recruiters, battered by poor art sales, are not hiring as much as in past years. And some offer positions that seem to exploit young people's desperation to gain a foothold in a creative industry. "The one thing I am dealing with is that paid internships are not paid anymore," Ammadi said. "Employers ask, 'Can we get students to volunteer?' I always say, 'You're not getting a student who wants to donate their time to re-brand your entire organization or create some logo free of charge.' "

Some Corcoran students said they sometimes feel a bit sore about their lot compared with what students face in traditional colleges or graduate schools.

"It's not like we can read a textbook and take a test -- we have to build things," said Erika Nizborski, 21, a photojournalism major. "Other students, they really don't get it. I've been getting into multimedia, which means working with audio. It took me 10 hours to edit two minutes of audio. Two minutes."

In one of her recent photo classes, Nizborski was showing classmates and the professors a project titled "Middle American Recession," a series of images of her sister, her sister's husband and their three kids in Missouri. Nizborski's sister works part time and the brother-in-law had been forced to cut back his weekly hours at a job at a concrete plant. Nizborski said her photo subjects seemed a bit baffled by her path. "They were like, 'What do you go to grad school for?' "