The entire thread is pure gold. If you scroll down, he writes:

> The Chair [of the Columbia Film program] reached out and said he was confident that we could work out an arrangement to get my degree. But he insisted that I fly out to NYC immediately for an in-person meeting. So I spent a fortune on a last-minute flight in order to hear his proposal.

> But instead of telling me what I need to do to satisfy the requirements to get my degree, the Chair began pitching me his idea for a TV pilot. In excruciating scene-by-scene detail. I nodded along, waiting to get back to the terms of me getting my degree.

> But to my horror... I slowly begin to realize this IS the deal. He made it pretty clear if I wanted my degree, I needed to help him sell his tv pilot. Yep, the Chair of Columbia’s prestigious graduate film program tried to shake me down in order to jump-start his own stalled out career.

Columbia has a pretty questionable record with other masters programs in creative fields. The school is exploiting the Ivy brand, the NYC location and talent, and legions of students desperate to stand out in highly competitive creative fields. For instance, a 10-month MS in Journalism is $116k (including living expenses) while a 12-month M.S. in data journalism is $160k (https://journalism.columbia.edu/cost-attendance).

Yes, studying under true experts in NYC is a wonderful experience for people in film, theater, journalism, writing, the arts, etc. But there should be no expectation that a very expensive degree will lead to high-paying jobs in those fields. The fact that every year Columbia is setting up all of these new grads with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and little hope of repaying it in those professions is downright predatory.

The WSJ article that prompted the original Twitter thread is worth reading. A few graduates have managed to find low-paying, entry-level jobs in the film industry that pay under $50k per year, and probably did not require a master's degree. One of the grads they talked with is working at the local TJ Maxx ... the same job he had as a teenager.

Via one of the WSJ reporters who worked on the report:

At least 43% of the people who recently took out loans for master’s degrees at elite private universities hadn’t paid down any of their original debt or were behind on payments roughly two years after graduation.

It’s not just arts degrees. Other high debt, low-earning master’s programs: NYU publishing (debt: $116k, earnings: $42k), Northwestern speech-language pathology (debt: $148k, earnings: $60k), USC marriage and family counseling (debt: $124k, earnings: $50k).

All this is made possible by Grad Plus, the no-limit federal student loan program. Created in 2005, it’s now the fastest growing program. Based on partial data from the 2021 school year, grad students were on track to borrow as much as undergrads for the first time.

https://twitter.com/anfuller/status/1413160574205284352

I was one of these film MFA students, seduced by my own delusional idea that I could continue to develop my own work for several years (I was already a flailing filmmaker) and then re-launch my career. And then, if necessary, teach in a college film program with my MFA - and continue to develop my own work. It was all going to work out!

I’ve made many mistakes, but high-tailing from that program after 9 months and finding something else to do in life was not one of them.

Hindsight being 2020, I missed a fabulous opportunity to shoot a documentary about my MFA classmates, who were a very fine cross-section of the kind of students from around the world who would find and spend about a hundred thousand dollars in the year 2000 for the privilege of having a teaching assistant show you how to operate a video camera while simultaneously trying to read and understand the instruction manual. Probably for the first time.

The most successful of my classmates who stuck with it makes commercials in the Midwest. The nicest one never made a film at all yet somehow is a tenured professor at a small college in California. I stumbled my way into technology and am making up for years that were fun but deeply unprofitable.

I must say that the faculty at my program were the Woody Allen punch-line incarnate: because the stakes are so low.

I feel a problem is that at 18 you still have "main character bias"

You spend a lot of time consuming uplifting media during childhood to where you unconsciously think of yourself as the main character of the story.

When you're picking a major you just can't imagine things not working out, that's something that happens to side characters.

As a side remark, physics phd programs are a pretty awesome.

The better programs pay a living wage if you aren't supporting a family.

You can often travel the world for free by attending conferences in exotic locations.

The subject matter is fascinating, and the people tend to be interesting.

You learn skills that are highly sought after. The degree is well respected and transferable to multiple industries.

Your peers are collegial and want to see you succeed. Physicists tend to enjoy knowledge sharing.

You can generally exit at any time and immediately transition into lucrative careers in, for example, tech and finance.

It has it's downsides, but for how whimsical it is, it's a pretty soft landing if you decide you want out.

How do people feel about making this a regulatory requirement for your students receiving federal aid?

Track how many people graduate: - Go into a career in their field - Continue on to a different field of their own choosing - Never use their degree.

This information would align the goals of students with the goals of institutions a little bit better.

I know that it would be hard to track, but that kind of program feedback would have guided my choices more than graduation statistics.

> most of the instructors were struggling to establish a career themselves

One of my best friends is an architect in Europe. After years of struggling in the field, they went to be an instructor.

I dunno, I feel like it's a pyramid scheme, and it makes me sad.

Of all fields, do these students _honestly_ expect that going to a 6 figure film program to will turn them into a successful filmmaker? Look around. All the people who have made it in Hollywood did so through via nepotism/cronyism or by busting their ass making their own movies and getting lucky.

You probably have more chance of success investing all your time and money into real projects and trying to market/distribute them than spending years in school and drowning in debt.

Easier said than done, but there's no way into that industry that isn't tough and an MFA degree isn't going to impress anyone.

These programs are absolute cash cows for universities. One of the primary reasons that tuition has considerably outpaced inflation is government guaranteed loans. Two of the primary 'cost-disease' areas - healthcare and education - are some of the most regulated areas of our lives.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-6...

I think the problem is that in the American education system, anything needs to be taught at a university. There are trade schools, but there are no "real" trade school degrees that actually mean something.

The idea of academic research is valuable in pretty much any field. Do we want academics studying film as an art form? If you mediate about this question, I think you'll come to the conclusion that we (as society) do want that. Similarly, I have no doubt that these professors care first about their research, second maybe about teaching, and consider anything else as sideshow. Because that's how it is in any academic discipline (with whatever rigor you want to attribute to the scientific aspect of it).

However, in the US, people go to university to learn a skill. I'd ask: Why? I have a friend who became an extremely skilled TV producer, and he has never seen a university from the inside. He did a dual-path education, working for a public broadcaster and visiting a trade school for film at the same time. This dude is superb at what he does.

I see this pattern in many areas. University and practical skills are often distant. In some sense, they should be. Yes, the Humboldian ideal states that researchers should also teach. But they teach research. Today, to become an excellent researcher, you essentially have to forgo practical experience - there is so much pressure to be excellent in other areas.

The weirdest arena to see all this are business schools. These schools exist to educate practitioners. They make their money making MBAs, who generally have zero interest in academia.

However, talk to any academic professor (which is the high status position compared to "professors of practice") at a business school. What do they really care about? Their research, their academic peers, their PhDs. Everything else is a nuisance that pays the bills.

The amazing thing to me now is that friends of my children are going to prestigious schools to major in video game design. This is so strange to me, as a person who has made his adult living making video games. Obviously when I started no academic would take it seriously and considering it as a career seemed like a fantasy.

I am sure it is fine to study whatever interests you. And learning to think critically about anything is useful. But in the arts the real teacher is experience and everything important to know is currently unknown. I think Friedkin never went to college. He just worked at a TV station and shot news, shot dramas, learned how a camera worked, etc. You can go to a class and learn about what he did, but what he did he didn't learn about in a class.

My sister is a tenure-track professor of media studies at one point.

She told me at one point that there are as many film schools in the US as working videographers in Hollywood.

Of course, most people the Hollywood product jobs (film, sound, lighting) literally inherit those positions.

So four people? Pretty good.

I've heard there's a big market for wedding videographers, however. But that's not what most people thinking.

Isn't this the typical experience for a field that's winner-take-all and have tons of people who are "passionate" about it and are willing to do anything to get in? Or is columbia especially bad here?

I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs..

The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives.

An interesting idea I saw was the idea of making schools have skin in the game on these degree programs by requiring them to back some percent of the debt of these federal loans. I'd imagine admissions criteria, prices and career outcomes would adjust accordingly.

Also a question of when personal responsibility comes into play, I mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree. But by the time you are 22.. 24...26 and going for these six-figure MA/PHD tracks .. cmon.

Lastly - the idea that the professors in these programs were basically failed in making themselves careers in the fields themselves is not entirely shocking. Even in many STEM universities/programs, teaching is not very career outcome focus.

My personal experience was that professors cared about research first, PHD track students second, and career track BS degree students.. somewhere a few more notches down.

We all coach/develop people into molds of ourselves, and professors have a hard time looking beyond turning students into more professors. Obviously this does not scale..

>For those asking, of the other 51 students, the most common use for their MFA is teaching... in MFA programs

This was thrown in at the end of the thread. I imagine this is true for a wide variety of postgraduate degrees outside the STEM, law, medicine, and business. For example, what percentage of people with a masters in art history use that degree outside of teaching art history?

An acquaintance of mine recently started a MFA program at NY Film School. He's going to end up spending about six figures finishing the program, if he sees it through. I want to tell him it's a waste of money, but that's not my place - partly because he's an acquaintance and not a friend, and partly because it's just not polite.

But it's such a waste - and what's worse is he should know it. We worked together in post production for years. He's lived in Los Angeles even longer. If you want to be a filmmaker, the most assured path is to make films. Be a production assistant for 2 years. Yes it will suck - you'll be getting the director's car washed and fetching his coffee for under $200 day rate. But you'll make the necessary social connections, have experience on set (a near absolute necessity for any better jobs in the field), and know the actual ins-and-outs of film production, which is a fairly specialized niche. The other option is to make some indie films on your own dime, and jump from there. The really successful people do both. James Cameron got his big start doing shit-work on small films, and got noticed when he made maggots writhe on a horror film shoot by putting a 12v battery across them. Harrison Ford got his big break being a charming carpenter on set.

But this acquaintance is paying tens of thousands of dollars per year for someone else to tell him to make indie films, and for the criticism and critique from other people making the same stupid decision. Youtube will tell you why your indie film sucks for free, and you'll have a bigger audience to draw from.

On one hand it's frustrating, but on the other, I don't really like the guy, so mostly I'm alright just minding my own business. It does kinda suck that there's a whole industry around ripping these people off though. Good movies are cool. Making them is cool. You don't need a high end education to do it. There's a lot of parallels to programming cool (not CS-heavy) things like games or innovative apps. Or making pop music. You just have to do it.

Abolish federal loans for degrees. The insane cost of college will solve itself literally over night.

Letting 18-22 year old children take on six figures of debt that can not be discharged via bankruptcy is insane and downright immoral.

If the government wants to give away Pell grants then please do so by all means. But federally backed loans are causing irreparable harm.

The problem with digital creative industries is that they are essentially a zero sum game + zero marginal unit cost.

Example with music industry:

Zero sum: I as the average music listener will only be a fan of N artists. I can only listen to so many minutes of music per day. If I discover better artists it doesn't increase my total listening time. I instead have to kick another artist out of the rotation to bring in a new one. (same thing applies to people who only listen to playlists)

No marginal unit cost: adding more music listeners to the industry does not require more musicians to service them, Drake can supply the entire world with the same song for no unit cost

I suppose it's like football. There are only so many athletes that can make it to professional leagues. Best to check out the career prospects before undertaking the effort to train.

I took industrial design in school. I’m ballparking here, but I’d say the numbers are somewhere around 15% of my cohort are imployed in industrial design? But - many more are employed in adjacent fields, like UX, interior design, arts, etc.

(Also this wasn’t an American education so it was dramatically more affordable - still, a decade on and I know many who are still paying back those loans.)

I work at a University with an top-tier, elite MFA program (not in film) that attracts star-eyed students from around the world. I've seen so many really talented folks chewed up and spit out by a pretty brutal system where there is not much besides enormous debt and creative bankruptcy on the other side of graduation. However, I've learned not to be a dick about squashing dreams. Most of them know the reality in the back of their minds but are so enamored with the idea of the MFA that they are compelled to move on it.

> …I slowly begin to realize this IS the deal. He made it pretty clear if I wanted my degree, I needed to help him sell his tv pilot. Yep, the Chair of Columbia’s prestigious graduate film program tried to shake me down in order to jump-start his own stalled out career.

Perhaps the most eye-popping part of this twitter thread.

Instead of subsidizing the ridiculously inflated cost of these programs through loans, the government should just open a string of bare-bones universities across the country that offer decent job training for free. No fancy dorms, no deluxe athletics, just a free education. Don’t subsidize an over-expensive private market. Force the private market to compete with dirt cheap. (Same goes for health care, too)

Okay, so the school promised them success, but at what point is the student responsible for their own credulity? I can't name 55 working directors or screenwriters. If the entire high level staff of every movie and show I've watched in the past year retired, I'm not sure that would create enough openings. And there's other schools. And other classes. And not every one retires.

I actually had to read the thread to see whether the author thought this was a good thing or bad. My first it seemed like a pretty high success rate for a single class.

I guess it’s because “famous director” sounds like one of those majors that your idiot friends go into that couldn’t possibly ever end up getting them a job in the real world. Just like Archeology and Marine Biology, you know there’s such a limited supply of Indiana Jones and Jacques Cousteau jobs out there that you have to wonder why anybody would actually pay tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to set them up for that much disappointment.

I mean, sure, NASA does in fact hire Astronauts every year. But it’s probably worth hedging your bet just a bit unless you have a big safety net.

For those interested, I wrote a blogpost that touches on this general topic a while back, after learning some surprising things about the causes of high tuition costs:

"Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? Probably because the government handed them a blank check in 1993."

https://blog.usejournal.com/why-has-college-gotten-so-expens...

Is a masters degree actually useful in any profession? Many of the CS/data science/machine learning masters programs I've seen are basically 2-year data structures and algorithms programs with a few flashy-named electives thrown in, for people who already have a semi-technical bachelors.

I work in engineering for a multibillion dollar industrial/IT company and we don't have any policy to give employees a raise if they get a masters. It's always seemed like a scam to me.

I suspect those going into video game design programs have a similar success rate (if not worse.)

The problem with film school's like Columbia, is they're deluding their students with this ludicrously unreasonable expectation that they're going to graduate and immediately get jobs at the very top of the film industry hierarchy.

It's like if every business school just taught their students how to be CEOs, and completely ignored the practical, hands on skills required to actually work your way up to such a position over a decades long career in the real world.

Sure everyone wants to be a writer or director, but those so called "Above the line" positions make up a tiny fraction of the cast and crew that go into making a film, and sit at the tipy-top of the pecking order. The vast majority of people who work on a given film are in props, costumes, construction, set dec, production, finance, marketing, ec., yet film schools broadly speaking ignore all these lucrative, fulfilling film industry careers in favor of pumping out legions of wanna-be writers and directors competing for an incredibly small number of jobs.

Sadly, like so many other post-secondary institutions, film schools are really selling a dream rather than selling a path to a career.

"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema." --Werner Herzog

Googled "film and media studies starting salary" and this is the TOP result:

"The average film, video and photographic arts major who graduates from a school in the United States earns about $22,656 per year during the early years of their career."

It's not a secret.

I recommend to anyone who will listen that they do not get a graduate degree in the arts unless they are financially comfortable to do so. I love writing, but I didn’t get my MFA until I was making enough money to get that degree with the full knowledge that it probably wouldn’t pay for itself.

Industry training is probably a better entry to Arts and Entertainment. Since the director class jobs are going to be who-you-know and grace and favour anyway, pretending the degree got you there is silly: Convert this to classic apprenticeship with placements, stop selling dreams.

The real problem with so few making it to a career is that the debt will never be repaid. This increases costs for borrowers who will pay back their loans. In the end we all pay the price for this so such schools should be privately funded instead.

Honest question with no agenda for recent non-tech grads here: did you assume that merely getting a degree in something assured you would get a job? Even when I was a college student 40 years ago I never thought there was a causative connection.

I feel like this is obvious but maybe not to a 22 year old. It’s like saying that 4 graduates of the MFA program are working novelists, or 4 graduates from Alabama this year are going into the NFL. The careers where your work is distributed to millions of people have a huge gap between public awareness of the profession and the number of jobs available in it, because each producer serves millions of consumers.

These days, you should only go to film school if you have an active YouTube following... if you don’t already have the drive and the skill to create video and market it, you don’t even have a chance of surviving.

I'm pretty sure the rich people going into these programs don't think that all 55 of them are going achieve the big film career, but rather that they themselves will be one of the 4 of 55 that make it.

Govt funding of a student's degree in proportion to the need for that skillset. We need it.

China does something similar to this-- essentially preventing swaths of the population from getting useless degrees.

College didn't used to be the same as technical school or apprentice programs. They were there to let folks become educated.

To decide that a career is the only use of a degree, is a fairly modern conceit.

One of the things I realized way too late in the whole 'student debt' debate is that people in the US actually have to pay a market rate interest rate on it. Making it so that a lot of people can barely even pay the interest, let alone the principal.

$200k for a film degree, where you have a (arguably) one in 55 shot of even getting into the career should come with some warning signs to say the least.

My friend just left as a prof there. Things might be challenging moving forward if they can’t leverage that brand value with overseas folks…

Related podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlby1hcGkud3N...

The worst thing working class people can do is to take on the values and lifestyles of the upper and upper middle class.

This is how winner-takes-all markets work. Though I really think that the remaining 51 students could build their career upon skills, knowledge and network gained during the program. In the end, there are a lot of jobs where you tell stories which pay much better than the entertainment industry - at least on average.

If this is what you're interested in. Figure out what it is that you want to do specifically. Move to LA or Vancouver and get a job as a PA. Take whatever you can get. Show up early. Go home late. Bust your ass. Get in with the trade that you're interested in. Make nice with those people.

Just this weekend, I read this passage (p.219) in Making Of Prince Of Persia, by Jordan Mechner [1], where his colleague tries to dissuade him from tuition, and rather learning on the job:

Deborah had this to say about NYU: "They say it's a three-year program, but it really takes five years. You can expect to spend $2000 on your first-year film, $10,000 second year, and $20,000 third year. Add that to three years' tuition, and you've spent a hundred thousand dollars. What I would do, if you have the wherewithal - I mean, three years and $100,000 - is spend those three years working for free on every film shoot you can. At the end of it, you'll know how a film gets made; everybody will owe you favors, so you'll have a crew; the equipment rental places and the labs will know you, so they might give you a deal too. Take the $100,000 and make a feature! Then you'll be a filmmaker." She sighed and said: "But no one ever does that. They come around like you're doing, and ask a lot of questions, and I tell them what I just told you, and then they go off and enroll in the program."

1. https://jordanmechner.com/store/the-making-of-prince-of-pers...

As much as I hate leetcode type interview questions, I can't help but wonder what if film industry had a reliable* way to gather signal, and thus don't have to rely on institutions like Columbia to provide that stamp of approval.

More readable -

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1413326562821246978.html

I’ve seen several physics majors hired as software engineers.

I’m fairly worried about a future student loan crisis and collapse because this is not sustainable and certainly not something that functions as intended.

My brother graduated with a similar degree from a less prestigious school (Temple University) and has been working in the industry for over 20 years.

This would all be fixed if the government would stop backing student loans.