School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Date: Mar 21 2017
Major: Fine Arts - Painting/Sculpture/Photography/etc (This Major's Salary over time)
LET ME HELP YOU. I want this review to be completely directed towards prospective students deciding on whether or not to attend SAIC, or art school in general for that matter.

1) If you do not come from an affluent family please do yourself a favor and do not come here. In fact, please DO NOT go to art school…PERIOD. We live in a new world economy now, and the jobs that you will be qualified for post graduation will be the most competitive (cough..academia..) to get and will pay the LEAST. Anyone with half a brain (and someone who doesn't have a trust fund to fall back on..) understands that the only way to make enough money to support yourself or a family one day in the United States 2017 requires going into tech, engineering, med, business or finance. Did you know that if you study computer science and learn Python or C++ you can get a software engineering job straight out of college that pays 70-100k? With a BFA you only qualify for jobs that pay 20-32k a year, and the only way to save yourself is to go to grad school and learn a different skill to get a new career. The ONLY people that will benefit from SAIC are people from wealthy families that can always use their family connections to land an unpaid internship and live off of mom and dad while they build their fake career as a blogger, only to end up working in HR at Goldman Sachs because their mom and dad decided to cut them off. This school only makes sense for the financially elite that don't actually ever have to get a "real" job. If thats not you…DO NOT GO TO ART SCHOOL, please.

If you are an artist, keep your studio practice and attend residencies and apply for grants. Become friends with influential people, network the fuck out of the art world the best you can. But do all of this while holding down your real 9-5 job that you got because you DIDN'T go to art school…

2.) SAIC is a fucking fantastic liberal arts education. You will become a brilliant thinker if you apply yourself at this school. But, see above, becoming a scholar of Derrida, Baudrillard and Hegel doesn't get you a job when you graduate. ( And all of you writing majors who scoff at this, the chances of making enough money to be a functioning adult in this society as an editor or writer are slim as fuck, considering the intense competition. P.S. the people who become editors and writers are extremely lucky and talented, and have wealthy supportive parents that paid for like three unpaid internships so they had enough experience to land a job.)

3) My fist day of classes at SAIC I was in drawing class and our 86 year old instructor told us that if we went here we would have to marry rich. I'm not even kidding guys!

4) There are NO straight men here. Time to get a 40 year old investment banker boyfriend that will have strange fetishes and love bragging to his co-workers that he is dating "an artist."

5) I have met some of the best people here. But after you graduate, you and your friends will go through a traumatic "waking up" period where you realize you should have said "yes" to your 40 year old investment bankers proposal last May because now you are working for $12/hr and your ultimate frenemy just got an unpaid internship in Switzerland.

6) If you go here and graduate with a BFA, you will either be going back to grad school for another degree or will become a world and culture shifting entreprenuer that starts a company that makes millions. Because your so brilliant now that you went to SAIC.

7) Everyone smokes here. Don't start and don't do heroine either.