On Dec 20, 2013, at 8:07 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The UK stats indicate only 4% of individuals that undertake
> degrees in Art and Design obtain employment as designers. In engineering,
> the employment from university is around 100%
The majority of my graphic design students last year had design positions lined up before they graduated. I don't keep track but certainly massively over 4% are employed doing the work they studied. I don't try to track engineering grads but in the US it seems like near 100% employment in oilfield engineering happens during drilling booms and massively less during drilling busts. A similar pattern happens in many other engineering fields.
Is your 4% figure arrived at by taking all degrees in art and design (including painting, sculpture, art history, etc.) divided by the number who get jobs as designers? My reply would be "duh" if I believed it but even that method strikes me as implausibly low. Maybe the US is different from the UK. Definitely East Carolina University does a better job of preparing young designers than the US average but the School of Art & Design at ECU has a lot better employment rate for all graduates (including painting, sculpture, art history, etc.) than your figure.
In short, I find your claims very, very hard to accept as representative of fact.
And, of course, engineering vs. the whole of "art & design" is a ludicrous comparison. If, somehow, mechanical engineering and cultural studies were in the same department, would you say that mechanical engineering was economically unimportant because of the dearth of employed post structuralist literary critics?
I find your claims about the importance of math in design to be particularly interesting in light of your use of numbers in these claims.
> The 'number of fields' assessment is not as totally silly as it might seem.
> It offers an assessment based on lower bounds.
Sorry. What does that mean?
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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+1 252 258-7006
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