“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where-” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“Will my kid get a job?” In all my years in higher education, this is one of the most common questions I receive from parents whose students are interested in the arts and design field. I have heard this question at almost every admissions tour at every college I have ever taught. I have heard this while serving as an instructor and I have heard this as a parent. One time while I was at an admissions tour with one of my college bound sons this question was posed to me by a fellow parent. Neither of our kids was interested in the arts. Yet, when the other parent realized I taught classes in graphic design, he naturally asked the question, “My daughter is studying graphic design. Will she get a job?”. It has been posed to me at dinner with friends and at barbecues of friends of friends. It’s what every parent thinks, fears and worries about when their kid wants to pursue a career in the arts or design.
Unfortunately, I do not have a crystal ball, otherwise, I would be a rich man, or a rich graphic designer. Besides, I want to avoid any answer that expresses any philosophy of a future I have no control over. What I do know is that effort, engagement, and an understanding of the design field is a bigger part of getting work than the multitude of recommendations and pronouncements that begin with the words, “Ya know what you should do?”. My answer to everyone is “Yes, your kid will get a job and …”.
If your son or daughter is attending their last year of high school, chances are that you have been looking for them to attend college in the coming fall. At first, the college application process may seem like you are an Alice in some sort of Wonderland. But the truth be told, after you go through enough of them, you will probably find redundancy in the college admissions process. My youngest son, who was also an unwilling victim of these tours as a sibling before he went through them himself, said it succinctly to me upon completion of another tour, “Dad, if I close my eyes, I bet I couldn’t tell the difference from one college to another”.
Once into college, your son or daughter will go through their own Wonderland experience. It is their new beginning and a right of passage before adulthood. What goes through every parent’s head is how this experience will end. The question of future employment comes to the forefront of your thoughts because you care about your kid’s financial survival and their eventual independence. For every successful story one hears about the art and design field, we all know there are thousands of other stories that have different levels of success. There are even those that leave the field entirely and find success elsewhere. There is success out there, there are also failures, but mostly, there is everything in-between.
I am, and have been, in the graphic design field for a long time. I graduated with a BFA in graphic design in the mid 1980’s. I worked as an in-house designer for small graphic design firms and for large advertising firms. I have worked for land planners, architects, software companies and other graphic designers. I have worked for myself and I still do. I have taught full-time and adjunct, including at my own undergraduate school. I have taught part-time while working a full time job. I have taught design in some capacity at a dozen different schools throughout the New England, Minnesota, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC areas. I teach full-time and adjunct while doing some professional work, as well. I am not famous. I am not rich. I am somewhere in-between.
Have I ever wished to do something else after all these years? Not really… maybe win the lottery. I might have attended graduate school a bit earlier than when I did. I was in my fifties. If I had done anything differently, or timed it differently, I ask myself how my family and social relationships would have changed. The things we do to keep the lights on and the things we want to do in our professional careers do not always jive with each other in real life. I will say one thing for myself, I do not have regrets about where I am here and now.
First things first. A major, concentration, and/or degree in ‘art’ and a major, concentration and/or degree in ‘graphic design’ are two different things. I understand their teachings and projects overlap throughout public schools. I understand there are a few public schools which will go to lengths to distinguish their teachings between art and design, sometimes they may go as far as having separate classes. I do not have hard statistics for all of this, but I will speculate that most of the time both art and design for a majority of U.S. public schools, who are constantly under degrees of financial pressures, will be taught in the same classroom. There are also plenty of schools that may not even teach art, or do so very sparingly.
Even in an art class with an intention to expose students to both art and design, those design moments may not be 100% graphic design. There may be more projects geared to illustrative techniques, coding, or just learning software. These things are part of design, but do not encapsulate the entire world of visual problem solving. Your high-school graduate who is interested in design will get a heavier dose of what graphic design entails when they get to college.
Colleges usually do not make their design programs 100% immersive. There will still be art classes for design majors and design and typography classes for those interested in the fine arts. There are also liberal arts classes and other electives to take, as well. After all, what are we designing for if not for all those things that are not simply art or design courses?
Art and design’s aesthetics overlap, but their purposes are different. A student’s idea of self-expression, interpreting ideas, emotional resonance, and just the simple idea of beauty will be affected by the fact if one is doing this as a sole act of expression or doing this as a designer. Clients, their audiences, their purposes and their budgets will factor into a design process. In graphic design one is hired to resolve a visual or semantic problem and the process to do so exists within an organization’s social structure, preferences, sensitivities, budgetary concerns, timely parameters and everything else that fits into their benchmarks. A designer’s history, their own social experiences, their knowledge and work ethos will also become part of this.
There are then the choices of four-year programs, two-year programs, or technical training programs. In four-year programs your graduate will receive a form of a Bachelor’s Degree, in two-year programs probably an Associates Degree. If one is attending a technical training program with an emphasis on code, software, or otherwise, it would be wise to see what one receives at its conclusion after all that money and time spent. I do not have statistics that speak for employers on whether they prefer BFAs or BAs or Associates degrees or if they even care. A better barometer of this would be to review job listings where prospective employers will communicate a degree as a minimum requirement to apply for a role. Since applications go through online portals, a prospective employee will have to submit their completed degree information through this portal and go through its filtering process in order to be considered for a first interview.
So what does this all mean in applying to college for graphic design? I am going to guess that staying in-state, tuition cost, and other financial considerations are going to be a priority for most parents and graduates. It would be nice to go to that elite art school in New York, California, or New England. It would be nicer still to keep your out-of-college debt from reaching six figures.
According to DataUSA there were a little over 9000 graphic design degrees awarded to students in 2023. 2023 breaks a trend of declining degree amounts for every year since 2017. The 2023 amount is still less than the almost 12,000 degrees awarded from ten years prior. That is a 25% drop over the past ten years. One way to look at this is that there is less competition out there. Another way is to say there are less jobs. Also, tuition can be as much as five times greater to achieve a degree out of state, than to get a degree within the state one lives.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says there were a little over a quarter of a million graphic design jobs in 2023. It also says that there will be an increase for the need of graphic designers of about 2% over the next ten years. One would have to delve further into those numbers to see the distribution of what kind of graphic design jobs they encompass. They can include: Creative Directors, UX Designers, Product Designers, Exhibition, Environmental Signage, Brand, Visual, UI and Web Designers, not to mention Web Developers. It can include Senior, Junior, and budding Art Directors. The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) offers a more comprehensive look at the employment outlook for graphic designers.
Dear moms and dads, your son or daughter will get a job. Graphic design is a healthy profession and has been for a long time. DataUSA, The US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) have listed median salaries ranging from $60,000 a year to $80,000. Factors such as entry-level positions, experience and leadership roles, if not ownership, are going to pull those numbers back and forth. How that range affects one’s living standards is going to be up to whether you live alone or with a roommate. Rental rates eat into our salaries big time. It sure is nice to share rent with someone. The West and East coasts have better salaries, and bigger costs of living. All these permeations go on and on.
I can also vouch first hand there is no secret cabal of left or right leaning radicals in the design education field. I would not worry that your son or daughter will disappear into a political void of one-sided opinions, come home and scream at you at the Thanksgiving table. There are, however, many voices in the design field. How can there not be? Design is creating visual solutions through art and communication, helping shape perceptions by influencing what people see and how they feel about products, services, and information across the wide spectrum of human communications. It includes all types of people. The inherent nature of design on both a semantic and aesthetic level is to dig a little and find information and the truths behind it. It is rarely, if at all, a singular, objective truth, but the interconnectivity of experiences merged with empathy, observation, and a mindset centered on accomplishing something for the intended audience. Your budding graphic designers can look up all the content and all the apparent truths around them, be taught from teachers anywhere in this world, but in the end, when school is finished, it will be up to them to make their own decisions in how they pursue design and move forward in life. What served as family in the previous eighteen years will also be part of this. As a fellow parent, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask a potential school, “How in what you are teaching, helps my son or daughter grow and function in today’s world?”
Ultimately, regardless of your choice of school or its philosophies, a large part of the success of your college graduate is going to be up to… your college graduate. Through all my years of teaching, one big characteristic that separates the very good from the OK students is engagement. I am not talking about the type of engagement where a student shows up by rote to every class, but an engagement in which a student thinks about and makes design a part of one’s self in between classes. I do not mean that everyone has to breathe the subject matter 24/7, but to never engage or remotely think about a subject matter in between classes is a sure fire way to being just OK at that subject matter and as a designer.
Design is everywhere and it surrounds you wherever you go. Fulfilling assignments for your class should not be treated simply as a series of tasks to achieve a final grade, but looked at as a myriad of sensibilities and possibilities that can connect design to one’s self and community. Empathizing with the content and its users, understanding and exploring varying and unknown perspectives, being challenged beyond the obvious parameters of given deliverables, combining one’s own imagination and aspirations to solve real-world problems, all of these characteristics will arise individually within a design student if they go beyond the physical act of walking into a classroom, doing the work, then walking out.
I think it is fair to ask a higher education institution what graduates, upon leaving with their degree, are doing right after they graduate. I think it’s also fair to ask what they are doing two years out, five years out, maybe even ten years out after graduation. Just be prepared for the answers of naivety and misdirection, if not a single one-off story of success. Every school has at least one highly visible success story. It would be nice to know what greater examples of successes there are after graduates have left school.
Wonderland is the journey through school and life after. I could give an educated guess about what is in store for design in the next ten years and I would get a bit of it right. I will also get a lot of it wrong. Alice’s Cat knows far more than I do. Speaking personally, what I hope from my own graphic design students upon their graduation, is not only what they are learning, but how one goes about learning it, then trusting themselves to make their own independent decisions. This core principle is what will help make budding graphic designers adaptable to an unpredictable market and future. When all is said and done, all these college applications and all these clever predictions and wisdom (including my own) will slowly disappear into their past of floating smiles and clever sayings and leave them with our trust and hope that they will find their own path forward.
Peter Kery, September, 2025
