Film School: Still for Suckers
Film school is the journalism school of people who can't write. It's a place where kids with vague dreams of "making projects" go to chill out for a few years and learn that you should never call a "film" a "movie." Then they come out and get a shitty job for little money that pays them purely in proximity to power.
Also like journalism, the job market for film school graduates is notable for its paucity, which rises in direct correlation with the amount of student loans incurred in said school. And, in accordance with the poor decision-making skills inherent in the group, the applications to these schools naturally skyrocket at the same time the economy plummets. Tying it all together: the absurdly unrealistic expectations of success that afflict students and potential students with wearying uniformity.
But today, the NYT reports that... yeah, it's still pretty much the same. Film school applications are way up! The film school graduate job market is crap! And everyone in film school is destined to be a big success, somehow!
"I've never seen a major start with so many students in it so quickly," said David D. Lee, dean of the Potter College of Arts and Letters at Western Kentucky University, which last year added an undergraduate film and television production program. It now has 84 majors, many with only a vague notion of the future for which they are training. "I'm going to make a career that probably doesn't even exist right now," was Mr. Lee's description of the prevailing ethic.
We're going to tell you the truth, purely out of a spirit of friendship: all of you Western Kentucky University film graduates will be failures. Only as far as the movie industry is concerned! If it makes you feel any better, you also would have been failures had you gone to the Western Kentucky University school of journalism. Or the NYU school of journalism, for that matter. Or the NYU film school. It's not you—it's the system.
I bet a story about disaffected young college graduates would make a great movie.
