LONDON, United Kingdom — The fashion education sector is booming. As the scale and scope of the industry has grown over the last decade, and social media has opened up a once secretive business to the masses, the appeal of fashion as a career opportunity has grown with it, leading more and more young people to pursue fashion education.
“Fashion education has grown enormously in scale compared to ten years ago,” says Sara Kozlowski, Director of Education and Professional Development at the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). “In some cases institutions have experienced enrollment increases tripling student populations.”
In the United Kingdom, there are more than 30 colleges and universities now offering fashion degree courses, with thousands of fashion design graduates each year. And, private institutions like the Condé Nast College of Fashion and Istituto Marangoni are also muscling into the fashion education market — setting up programmes in China, India and beyond to meet the burgeoning interest in fashion education in Asia’s fast-growing economies.
So, how to navigate this increasingly complex fashion education landscape? The purpose of the BoF Global Fashion School Rankings out today is three fold: it aims to assess the value and impact of this growing sector, in hope of aiding prospective students in making informed choices about pursuing higher education in fashion; it acts as a tool for universities and colleges to improve their education offerings; and it serves as a resource for the wider industry to engage in a discussion about fashion education.
The ranking is based on a rigorous methodology incorporating 60 different data points gathered directly from a shortlist of 24 top fashion institutions, surveys completed by 4,032 students and recent alumni, feedback from 88 HR professionals and global fashion influencers and our own BoF analysis of 21 undergraduate and 10 graduate programmes around the world.
First, the good news: students are generally “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the teaching (83 percent), the library and study materials (83 percent), and workrooms, buildings and campuses (76 percent).
Students were particularly complimentary about their teachers. “Tutors are of a very high calibre and with relevant experience from industry or still work within industry. [They] are very good at recognising potential and pushing students to produce their best work,” one former student from Central Saint Martins comments.
“I really believe FIT is among the last remaining US fashion schools that provides students with an adequate education in garment construction and patternmaking. It’s a quintessentially old-fashioned technical school, which has advantages and disadvantages alike,” writes an alumnus of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
“The teachers were absolutely golden, each and every one of them has a story to tell that made me want to pursue a career in fashion even more,” adds a student from Polimoda.
However, in other areas, there remains a significant gap between the expectations of these students vis-à-vis their actual experiences while in school and after graduation. In particular, many students were significantly less satisfied with the support in finding employment.
“Brilliant school, brilliant exposure, zero help afterwards,” says one former Central Saint Martins student.
“Parsons tested my work ethic and exposed me to a diverse student body and resources, but poorly prepared students for the realities of job placement and career development,” echoes a Parsons alumnus.
Indeed, only 57 percent of the 4,032 students in our survey are satisfied with careers services, just 53 percent are satisfied with networking events and only 49 percent are satisfied with the quality of recruiters on campus. And afterwards, many disappointed students report that they end up taking jobs outside of fashion, or not finding jobs at all. With BA tuition fees costing an average of $ 18,000 per year and MA tuition an average of $ 23,000 per year, students are clearly looking for a better return on this significant investment.
“More emphasis is needed on career options and specific design career fairs need to be implemented as this is lacking in the programme,” says a student from Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. “Unfortunately there was not much help when it came to graduation and career advice. This was left up to myself,” adds another.
The underlying root cause of this global fashion education issue may be something experts have dubbed “The Project Runway Effect.” While many young people are attracted to working as fashion designers due to the growing visibility of the industry on television and social media, the growing popularity of fashion education has not been matched by a corresponding increase in fashion design jobs.
According to statistics compiled by the CFDA and the Department for Education, in 2013 there were 17,370 reported jobs as ‘fashion designer’ in the United States. “It’s estimated that each year about 10 percent of the total job pool are graduating from undergraduate programs and entering industry with degrees in fashion design, which in turn has created an oversupply,” says the CFDA’s Kozlowski.
This means that each year, the US fashion sector would have to make room for 1,700 new fashion design graduates either through attrition or market growth, which seems highly unlikely. And as more and more graduates emerge each year, there are fewer and fewer jobs on offer.