3D education marketing is exactly the same. Most schools can dig back into their past graduates and find someone who now works at a brand name VFX house. They then tell prospective students “John Smith studied here and now works at Ace studios!” but they don’t tell you about the 50 other people who graduated in his year who are now manning the prestigious counters of doughnut king or who work in an entirely different industry. They also don’t tell you that John Smith studied there 6 years ago, and worked his way up through 4 non-famous studios before he worked at Ace, and therefore they can’t take much credit for his success that far down the line after graduation.

You don’t find out until you get inside a school exactly how they juiced the numbers, but you can be sure they are almost always juiced. One example is graduate surveys that simply ask “have you been employed (anywhere) in the 12 months after graduating” and this then becomes a “85% of our graduates are employed!” statistic presented to potential students. Doesn’t matter if you only worked at burger king, or only worked for 2 weeks out of 52, they will count you as a success statistic. Then they focus on a few people with higher profile success in VFX to put a human face on the school.

The real truth about student success stories is this: most of the time when a student goes right from school to a high profile studio that student had prior training and/or experience. If you don’t believe that look into these success stories yourself through these student’s blogs and google and a pattern of prior exposure and mature age will be there most of the time. Most 3D noobs considering training would be shocked at the number of “success stories” who were already in the industry when they took this or that 3D course… Unfortunately for the average student they have little to no hope of emulating that success right after graduation. 3D is not easy.

The other key thing to remember about success stories is that some people are so dedicated and focused they would have succeeded no matter which school they attended. When you see someone with student work so good it’s obviously 400% better than the average student work of that school, you can be confident that person would have succeeded almost anywhere, because they are clearly proactively teaching themselves. People capable of proactive self teaching will succeed with or without training- In these cases education just accelerates things a bit. When you see examples of successful students work as part of education marketing, you should always try to find out how many people attend that school. If you see 10 great student projects but they had 300 people enrolled, you are obviously only seeing the top 3% of students, which is a highly misleading sample.

Education is a wonderful thing, and some schools are definitely providing a higher quality of training than others. There are some really good schools and dedicated teachers out there. It’s also true that a proportion of students will not succeed no matter how good their training might be, they just don’t have what it takes. However this doesn’t change the fact most students enrol chasing a dream that has been aggressively marketed to them which is statistically very unlikely to come true, and the schools absolutely know this.

I’m not even saying this is unethical… after all if someone wants to sell you a soda they tell you how great it tastes, not that it will make you fat. That’s life. Just remember no matter what school you go to make sure you work your ass off because there will be no refunds at the end if you can’t get a job.

ILM films and Disney films are lures that keep a constant influx of new artists coming in, once the previous batch burnt out. VFX soldier should definately take a look at BaseFX. Just because the company is in China, the employer and his contacts can just overlook and turns a blind eyes to working situation

Talent is not required for admission into vfx education. Although conventional art Schools like Rhode Island School of Design cary a strict selection process, our Politicians and Bankers are making a grab for guaranteed student loan cash by admitting anyone who can sign their name by selling them on a lucrative dream job. You can be designing the next Iron Man suit: considerable artistic and technical talent is not a requirement ..just a signature, that is all you need.

No big surprise who’s behind some of our vfx schools here in the good ole USA, read on :

“The $81,000 video game art program, for instance, graduated just 14 percent of its 272 students on time and only 38 percent at all, while the students carried a median debt load of nearly $59,000″

To read the whole article and see who’s behind :
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/politics/mitt-romney-offers-praise-for-a-donors-business.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

” A race to the bottom — a race to maximize profits by short-changing students and taxpayers — ensued. It propelled a decade of waste, fraud, and abuse with taxpayer dollars by this industry, which now hauls in about $32 billion a year in federal aid.”

EDMC (41% owned by our good friends at Goldman Sachs) owns The Art Institutes.

More on this here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/edmc-professors-and-stude_b_1909449.html

It’s no wonder that anywhere hollywood and gameland emerge this crap soon follows. According to a top manager at one of the renowned VFX shops with ownership in India:

“…about 8 out of 1,000 that we train are even capable of being in production” sad news for an already beaten down population.

However.. working those hours for the best part of the duration of a project (becoming the norm nowadays) has those other associated costs of which we’re all aware.

Overtime is meant to be a disincentive for companies to overwork people. It doesn’t seem to be working..