Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Art School: At What Cost?
F Newsmagazine: At the start of the semester, students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago brace themselves for a big bill: there’s tuition, housing, food, technology fees, of course — but at an art school, there’s an added, more hidden cost: the cost of materials for each studio course.
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I have rather strong opinions on this topic about material costs for art programs. For intro level courses, I feel like part of the whole class is being introduced to what materials you want, so there's no way to buy the right materials off the bat. For a class like hand drafting, I really don't understand why the school of drama cannot supply a few test pencils, led pointers, ect just so that students can try them all out, and then decide which one they like better, rather than spending a bunch of money on a led pointer that you will never use because you liked mechanical pencils better. Especially as a BXA student where I was given a box full of easily hundreds of dollars of materials for an engineering class without having to go out and source anything on my own, because I would have no idea what I was buying in that situation. I feel like that ideology should be applied to arts schools, because it's hard to learn when you both don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on the wrong thing, and also haven't been taught what the right thing is yet.
I relate a lot to this article. Coming into this school and this program, financial stress has always been a big concern and was the largest obstacle I faced in deciding whether I could attend this school. I remember when I toured a year ago, that topic was something I talked about with one of the DP's in the class above me, and they told me that we would have to buy materials, but assured me that we'd be refunded for any materials we bought for class. That was certainly comforting and helped me feel better last semester as I had to start buying so many materials for each of my classes. One quote directly from this article is “I don’t remember the exact price, but I do remember my soul dying while checking out at Blick.” And I relate to that. I do also remember the exact price, and I remember that that was just one of many trips to Blick or elsewhere to get supplies that were required for class and different projects. I spent hundreds of dollars last semester, almost solely on materials for classes. We were handed a list at the beginning of the semester for our main DP classes and told we needed to get all of those materials by week 3. I ended up buying almost everything on the list because I didn't want to run into a situation where I didn't have something later on. But I ended up spending a lot of money that was never refunded, and multiple things that I bought from the list were either never used, or were items that certainly could've been split between at least 3-5 of us, but we were all told to buy our own. I think it's most frustrating because I was told multiple times that we would be refunded for any materials we bought for class, but then when I started asking around, no one could give me a straight answer about how to access that, or I was told it didn't actually meet the criteria for refunds.
Additionally, we are paying so much money to be at this institution, and I don't think it's unreasonable for us to ask for funds, especially in freshman year, to be able to purchase the materials we are required to have.
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