If graphic design is a vocational subject, we are teaching too many students. But it isn't - it is a worthy academic subject. the trouble is, few degrees in graphic design come close to the intellectual rigour we should be demanding. Students deserve better. (first published 2002)
With the number of students on graphic design degrees far outnumbering the number of 'relevant' job opportunities available to them, we need to ask: Is graphic design an academic subject worthy of study in its own right, taking on more and more students, or should it remain vocationally oriented, geared towards the immediate needs of employers and restricted by the law of supply and demand?
Traditionally, graphic design (GD) courses were run as vocational workshops: students were given projects and guided, via critiques (or 'crits') to an aesthetically pleasing or challenging end-result. A portfolio was built up that could demonstrate a standard list of technical skills. Many of these programmes were geared towards the need of a particular industry and often set out to emulate the workplace in as much detail as possible. It might be described as a 'let's pretend' atelier. This apprenticeship approach, in which teachers (often visiting from industry) take on the role of gurus guiding pupils in their craft, might once have worked when those pupils only wanted, and expected, to find jobs in the industry they were being trained for and when there were a lot fewer students.
Today, the picture is rather different. Mass participation means there are far more students taking art and design degrees than could ever hope to become artists or designers. Students recruited to these programmes with the promise of such careers are being lied to. The photography industry, we are told in a well-worn example of over-supply, can only absorb two percent of the graduates produced each year. Aren't they wasting their time, and the government wasting their (our) money?
The graphic design programme I ran had around 300 students on it. No more than around 40% of them will ever become graphic designers. If this was a vocational programme, with a vocational curriculum, it was failing 6 in 10 of every student we accepted, and producing people who were trained in things that were of no use to them, or society. At this year's D&AD show hundreds, possibly thousands, of design graduates will show their wares. Visitors from industry will once again criticise the sheer numbers of graduates there and question the thinking behind such oversupply - the vast majority won't get jobs as designers and will be justifiably upset when the truth sinks in.
The standard counterargument to this, that art and design (A&D) graduates are able to do much more than simply what their degree suggests, is not getting through: the fact is that a graduate from an art school gets turned down for a lot of jobs because the perception is that all they can do is draw/sculpt/sew dresses while a graduate in, say, English is perceived as much more adaptable. The irony is, if you want a job in an advertising agency, graphic design graduates need not apply unless you want to be a 'Mac monkey' down in the basement realising other people's ideas. And with good reason - our A&D curricula, by focussing on technical skills that would be better picked up on the job are limiting our graduates' options, wasting money and damaging futures.
Much of Art and Design, when it began offering degrees, failed to make the leap from vocational to academic, and what the difference is. The language is not helpful and tends to evoke arguments about 'elitism' and 'opportunity' that miss the point - so let's say it: yes, all education is in some way vocational. But the terms have definite meanings. The Quality Assurance Agency doesn't help much with its woolly language, but an honours degree, by their definition, is "distinctively academic, and may lead to professional careers in some fields" while Foundation Degrees/HNDs are "intended to be distinctively vocational, and to lead, typically, to technician and para-professional employment". Universities have a responsibility to "ensure that the academic content of honours degrees is not diluted." In other words by dressing a vocational qualification up as something it isn't.
Yet, this is precisely what is happening in many art and design degrees. Rather than rewrite courses to reflect the change from HND to BA, many A&D institutions chose an easier route; to quote a colleague who tried to sum it up without any hint of irony, A&D degrees are "HNDs with a bit more writing". Or 'Mickey Mouse' to use a popular term.
This is by no means true of the whole sector - fine examples of degree programmes exist that not only adhere to, but also help to set the 'gold standard' of what a degree means. But many courses are often just three years of learning how to use an Apple Mac and entering endless competitions (consequently guaranteeing that each year's graduates have identical portfolios), with a dissertation thrown in during the final year for 'academic rigour' - your classification based on how much certain tutors 'liked' your final pieces, rather than on how much you learnt along the way. Excellent vocational programmes have become diverted from what they do best, and many of the resulting degrees are worthless.
Why the reluctance to adapt programmes if we truly want to offer degrees? Why the rush to make excellent vocational programmes into degrees? Are institutions simply being lazy, adding an extra year to existing, perfectly good, vocational programmes to create more marketable, more popular, more profitable 'BAs'? Possibly, but the fact is that A&D is a subject worthy of study at degree level, but many degrees are still tied to the fantasy that A&D is a purely practical discipline, of no use outside its vocational base. The blame for this lies at the chalk-face: the mix of 'lecturers' who are either quietly seeing out their last years after long careers in industry, or young arts graduates who have never set foot outside the academy, lost in some dream of being 'an artist' and producing yet more 'artists'.
There is an irrational fear among these critics of the academic approach to art and design that it will somehow diminish 'the visual'. In fact, one colleague of mine could never get past this argument, though he could not explain what he meant by it other than "making things look nice". I despaired openly of the fact that I was in charge of a programme that awarded credits towards a degree every time someone made something 'look nice'. Where, I asked, is the knowledge, the contextualisation, the social and cultural awareness, the theory? Theory, it was claimed, is useless: one member of my team who had worked as a designer for thirty years proudly boasted that he didn't know any theory beyond gut instinct ("and how do you teach that?" I asked him, to which he responded that students either had it or they didn't and those that didn't could always become postmen!). A request to my team to revise the reading lists for modules resulted in long lists of what can only be described as coffee table books of, you guessed it, things 'looking nice' that students might like to use as 'inspiration' (i.e. 'copy'). This emphasis on surface aesthetics rather than knowledge and understanding of a discipline, it is suggested, is 'vocational' - what employers want and what students need to become designers.
This, of course, ignores the fact that the majority of our students never will become designers . Even those that will are getting watered down qualifications that fail to compare with their 'equivalents' elsewhere - no way can a substantial number of art and design degrees be called 'degrees'. Indeed, so threatening are these 'degrees' to a design career that they knock on the head any pretensions to being vocational as, if a graduate hasn't found a job within a year their technical skills will be well past their sell-by date. Employability in a skills-based educational environment has a worryingly short half-life making lifelong learning less an ideal and more an economic necessity. Much evidence exists to show that the narrower the curriculum, the less employable, the less adaptable a graduate will be.
We need to ask serious questions in graphic design, if not in HE as a whole. If we see ourselves, simply as producing the next generation of ground-floor designers with the tick-box list of skills required by employers (who as a consequence can save bothering with expensive staff development), we need to stop offering degrees that aren't by any stretch of the imagination comparable to degrees in other disciplines and offer honest, vocational training and call it by its true name. And we need to limit the numbers we take on to these programmes because there is no point in flooding the market. But if we truly want to offer degrees, open to anybody no matter where they might end up, then we need to offer intellectually stimulating curricula that compare favourably (if not enviably) with the curricula being offered in other subjects.
And design is an equal amongst its more 'traditional' university peers: it is one of the most visible (in all senses of the word) contributions to our culture - it tells us, more immediately than other remnants, about the past, holds up a mirror to our present, and helps to shape the future. Designers need the opportunity and ability to contribute to our culture as responsibly and reflectively as possible - something that can only come from a cultural, historical and research-based perspective that purely vocational courses cannot offer.
The two systems, vocational and academic, can operate side by side and neither need be 'better' than the other, just different. This is not about status, but about outcomes and intent. Vocational qualifications are about training to be something. Academic qualifications are about learning about being. The difference is subtle on paper, enormous in its impact on curriculum and delivery. A graduate with a degree in graphic design should be able to become a graphic designer, and much more besides. Art and Design still has a lot of catching up to do before it is accepted as an academic discipline. Many (perhaps most) courses are already there, producing stunning graduates by any definition of the term and, contradicting critics of the academic approach, stunning, thought-provoking, intellectual visual work. But some are still populated by dinosaurs, obsessed with winning prizes, out of touch with both industrial and academic practice, who see teaching as a cosy world of sitting down and telling students how to make something 'look nice' or how things used to be in the old days, and who believe that anything that is not immediately 'vocationally relevant' is a waste of time. That's fine - but not on a degree course, which is about furthering understanding, not regurgitating ancient practices. For them 'research' is selling a painting or designing a leaflet on the side - not examining the role, say, of graphic design in globalisation, or how visual rhetoric has been used to fight wars; the sort of thing universities are supposed to be doing.
The next round of QAA inspections shouldn't be afraid to reclassify 'vocational' degrees of this nature to Foundation Degree or HND status, or criticise the throwbacks who insist on dumbing down academic programmes. Graphic design degrees should be producing intellectuals, thinkers, radicals, individuals - not carbon copy automatons in the image of their creators trained to emulate their tutors and make money for agencies by copying the latest visual trend. It's time to decide what a degree 'means' in art and design.
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