Here’s a great article…
http://stellarmine.com/7-reasons-why-school-might-not-be-for-you/

‎”If cigarette packs are required to have pictures of diseased lungs, college brochures should be required to have pictures of graduates working at Starbucks.” -Daniel Lin

Here’s where your tax money goes for college…

An excellent hour long video – please watch before getting into student loan debt!

Film School was once laughed off as a silly way for Joe Junior to smoke pot and watch risqué Italian movies while satisfying the family’s need for a college degree. But in 2011, Film Schools have become a Multi Million dollar profit machine, riding on the coat tails of America’s blind submission to the cost of higher education. And leaving their graduates financially devastated, and a leg down in the film business.

Film Schools are literally extorting entire life fortunes from clueless, wide eyed youngsters and their parents through clever marketing and romantic love affair with Student Loan companies. It’s a sordid saga that dates back to the mid 1990s.

Back then, the biggest names in film school were NYU and USC. I know, because I enrolled at NYU’s coveted film school back in 1996 and graduated in 1999 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production. This degree has proven to be extremely useful as both a paperweight and doorholder.

Why did I choose NYU? Like most of my peers, I was under the college crunch, blindly being led by my parents and teachers to believe that college was necessary for me to have any kind of a future. Since I loved making movies in high school, I figured I would apply to what I’d heard was the best film school: NYU. Looking back, the amount of research that went into this choice was staggeringly retarded.

I never talked to any working filmmakers or graduates of the program. I didn’t investigate what would be necessary to actually have a career directing movies. Had I done so, I would have uncovered a shocking revelation: Film School is widely ridiculed by people working in the film industry as an expensive waste of time. Working Pros in the film business do not look upon an educated film school grad as a good potential employee, but rather as a kid who was learned things the wrong way for 2 or 4 years.

This remains true even for grads of so called “Name” schools like NYU and USC. Can having a degree from one of these schools get you a job? Possibly… getting coffee for a much less educated producer or director. Or working as a bitch lackey to an Agent like Lloyd from Entourage.

I didn’t know this, and probably wouldn’t have believed it if you told me back in 1996. My eyes were starry wide and I was going to college at NYU! Life was amazing. I happily paid the $30,000 plus in tuition through grants, loans, and my family’s savings and emerged with a mere $12,000 in debt and no savings.

Across town, some old Hollywood Producers had been watching NYU Film School and scheming. They saw something weird: students and their families begging to get into NYU’s Film Program, to play with old film cameras and make stupid short films. And paying $30,000 a year to do so. After realizing how profitable this could be, the New York Film Academy was born.

At first, the NYFA (or NY Film School, so named to sound like NYU) was a joke. It was looked at as a place people who couldn’t get into NYU had to attend. But after 10 years of growth and the Internet, the New York Film Academy has become a profit machine. With a $10 million a year ad budget and a brilliant social media campaign, the school has set up campuses across the country and the world.

From Asia to Europe to New York and LA, the school have copied and expanded upon NYU’s model: hype young people up about filmmaking, add the allure of going to college, charge college level prices ($30,000 a year)….. Use shitty equipment, teach basic filmmaking techniques that could be learned on Youtube, let the kids put their names on the credits and say “action”… pay celbrities and directors huge speaking fees to talk at the school, and most of all: market the crap out of the program.

The result: New York Film Academy Grosses over $50 million a year. And NYFA graduates are considered a joke in the film business, a notch below NYU Grads. This is my own personal homage to New York Film Academy:

NYFA paved the way for more Private for Profit Film Schools. The Art Institutes is another brilliant creation. The behemoth “Education Management Corporation” owns and operates Art Schools and Colleges all over the place. They are a Multi Billion dollar corporation. Whoever said an education is priceless?

The Art Institutes have filled in an area where NYFA has relented: Middle America. Art Institutes campuses are in places like Portland and Kansas City and Dallas. They literally bring the dream of attending film school to people who won’t go to NY or LA, but who can sign up for a $100,000 student loan.

Case in point: I knew a young woman attending the Art Institute for film in Hollywood. She is a bright 21 year old actress with an interest in directing. I asked her about the program. She was working very hard on a short film, using a Pansonic HVX 170 camera. I asked her if she realized that this camera rents for $175 a day and can be bought for about $3,600.She was not, nor did she seem very comfortable discussing this.

I asked her what tuition was, and she said $30,000 a year for 3 years. I asked her how she was paying for that, and she said she’d gotten student loans of $90,000. I asked her if she had any idea the financial burden she was taking on, how much those monthly payments would be after school, how much she’d be getting paid after school, and how much the equipment she was using actually cost.

She said “You sound like my Father!”

Yeah, I did. The Dad, it turned out, was sick with worry as his daughter, technically an adult, had been granted a $90,000 student loan package.

The school has cleverly learned how to overcome that objection. By providing actual job placement statistics. It’s said in sales that if you acknowledge an objection, no matter how ridiculous your response may be, you actually diffuse the objection. This is a great example. Here’s the schools tuition fees from their own website:

And here’s their own job placement stats:

So, students graduate with $99,000 in debt…. only 61% find employment and those who do are making $31,000 a year? Never mind that film jobs require longer hours than other jobs, typically 10 to 14 hour days. And never mind that the $400 after taxes the student takes home will be virtually wiped out by rent, food, and their $500 to $700 monthly payment, with interest, on that loan.

A 19 or 21 year old won’t get this but they do have the power to take out $100,000 in loans that can never be forgiven through bankruptcy or any other legal means. That debt is theirs till death do they part. Film Schools routinely buy leads from internet marketers, for prospective students, at $20 or more a piece. NYFA spends more than $15,000 a day on Google Ads.

And at the end of the day, film school grads are once who get screwed, fighting for positions like this:

That’s the cruel joke of these film schools. Entry level gigs in film require no education, and I was working on sets when I was 17. Real filmmaking careers are built by those who skip class and go to work.

To shout this message out loud and clear to aspiring filmmakers, I created Film School Secrets. If you want some practical no bullshit advice on what to do instead of pissing away 3 year’s salary on school, then check filmschoolsecrets.com and learn how to get on real film sets, start networking with real filmmakers, and how to hire film students to work for you. But most of all, you’ll learn the smarter, faster, cheaper way to start your career the right way.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/39911910/

An MBA thinks he’s “too educated” to help a fellow employee…