Graphic design schools are teaching tech, but are they teaching taste?

Coming out of high school, I decided to pursue my BFA degree in Digital Design at the University of Colorado Denver, against the expectations of my family to major in a more lucrative STEM subject. I grew up as the smart nerdy kid with straight-As, but my dream was to become a creative professional. While I could’ve gone with a computer science major (like my software engineer cousin who makes six-figures), I decided to trust my intuition first.

Fast forward five years and computer science grads are facing record-high unemployment rates at 7 per cent in 2024, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, due to oversaturation and AI replacing entry-level roles. However, graphic design isn’t looking much better. The Federal Reserve lists commercial art and graphic design unemployment at 5.7 per cent.

But the other side of the list paints a peculiar picture. Those liberal arts majors who graduate with supposedly “useless” degrees? Their unemployment rate is 3.8 per cent, lower than graphic design and comp sci. Graduates from similar degrees in journalism and the social sciences have an even lower unemployment rate at 2.3 per cent. Hell, even the interdisciplinary study graduates have more luck finding jobs.

So what should aspiring graphic design students do? Switch their major to history or communications? Pivot, because they “picked the wrong major” again? Placing the blame on students for not choosing the most optimal path to employment ignores the systemic issues with college education today. Colleges and universities are treated as trade schools, rather than spaces to seek knowledge and create communities. In graphic design programmes, nothing is more enticing than the promise of a job at the end of the curriculum. But I argue that for graphic designers to succeed in an ever-changing landscape, we need to treat graphic design as a liberal art instead of a trade.

Talking about graphic design in this way sounds unusual but it isn’t a new hot take. The study of design as liberal art can be traced back to the 1920s with John Dewey’s The Quest for Uncertainty and Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School. In 1994, design educator Gunnar Swanson wrote a 13-page essay on the state of graphic design education that makes the same case. Three decades later, people still view design as a trade despite its development as an interdisciplinary subject.

While I can’t deny that graphic design has blue-collar origins — think of the printing press, typesetting, sign painting, etc. — and requires technical training (look at the Adobe wizards), it is also a field that touches a wide variety of subjects and industries. Design Issues editor Richard Buchanan notes that “we have seen design grow from a trade activity to a segmented profession to a field for technical research and to what now should be recognised as a new liberal art of technological culture.” As Richard explains in his 1992 essay Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, thinking of design as part of the liberal arts repositions its study to be not just vocational but a mode of research, argumentation, and critical thinking.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has come to think of technology as hardware, a product you need to learn, a hard skill. When Richard Buchanan acknowledges design as technologia, he sees this not as a hard skill (product-based) but as a mode of thinking (systems-based): “This is not thinking directed toward a technological ‘quick fix’ in hardware but toward new integrations of signs, things, actions, and environments that address the concrete needs and values of human beings in diverse circumstances.” Design students may be familiar with this “design thinking” process, an iterative framework where designers approach problem-solving with a human-centred lens that integrates theory (often from the social sciences) with practice.

The liberal arts as an educational requirement in the West dates back to the Renaissance. To complement his artistic practice, Leonardo da Vinci studied astronomy, human anatomy, cartography, botany, paleontology, and more. Richard describes the development of liberal arts studies from the Renaissance to its peak in the 19th century as an “encyclopaedic education of beaux arts, belles lettres, history, various natural sciences and mathematics, philosophy, and the fledgling social sciences.” This “encyclopaedic” approach provided students with “an integrated understanding of human experience and the array of available knowledge” at the time.

By the 20th century, each subject became more specialised and separated from one other to be studied under an increasingly microscopic lens. While specialisation paved the way for new innovations, the liberal arts became more fragmented than unified. With this context in mind, present-day universities providing students the same liberal arts and gen-ed requirements doesn’t mean each student will approach them with the same goals. As Gunnar Swanson explains, “The same psychology course may be a start toward the understanding of human behaviour for one student, a ‘breadth’ requirement for another, and an introduction to what will be a specialised field of study and research for a third.”

The lack of liberal arts integration combined with the pluralisation of college education has left design students behind. There is no meaningful integration of the liberal arts into design classes, often leading students to view their gen-ed world history and math classes as a waste of time rather than a context-based preparation for their design work.

While some design programmes have pushed for liberal arts requirements to help students become more well-rounded, much of the recommended coursework is geared towards professionalisation and many programmes are cutting or eliminating liberal arts requirements or electives altogether. Students are encouraged to take classes, or even a minor, in business or marketing to safety-proof their future.

There is nothing wrong with taking classes or subjects outside of one’s major. I think it helps students take a mental break away from the one subject that occupies most, if not all, of their time. Maybe it can lead to a new passion or hobby. But if the purpose of college is for students to maximise their hiring points by taking courses purely to amp up their resume and glow up their LinkedIn profile (i.e. hiremaxxing), then higher ed is no longer a place for genuine personal development. It’s just another boot camp for the corporate world.

“On the whole, design schooling has not helped students become broader thinking people who can help shape a democratic society. The tools for analysis and insight of many disciplines have broad extra-disciplinary application for understanding the world. The tools of graphic design do not seem to serve much purpose beyond a graphic design career.” – Gunnar Swanson

Graphic design as a specialised subject did not exist until the early 20th century. Most graphic designers at the time were traditional artists, illustrators, paste-up artists, and typesetters who learned on the job. They weren’t called graphic designers then. They were commercial artists who existed between the worlds of craft and fine arts.

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in 1919 with the goal of bridging the two worlds together, applying the pedagogy of fine art to vocational craftswork, and vice-versa. The curriculum was designed so that no matter whether a student was a painter, a sculptor, or an architect, they were all required to take foundation courses across traditional fine art, craft, and design practices, and also required to train in science and theory. Students took courses in art history, human anatomy, materials science, physics and colour theory as well as business management. The Bauhaus is an example of what later became known as a Swiss-style process school; its curriculum of foundation courses are often found in today’s higher education art programmes. One major difference though: Gropius’ Bauhaus School only cost 180 marks a year to attend, which equates to $1,700 today.

With rising tuition costs and funding cuts to arts programmes, the financial barrier to design education alienates students from first-generation and low-income backgrounds. It certainly doesn’t help that the design industry is (still) mostly white. Even for international students who can afford double the tuition of domestic students, those not fluent in English have trouble catching up. Former lecturer Harriet Richardson recently discussed how the lack of funding in UK design programmes pushes universities to accept more international students than the system can handle — hoping that the exorbitantly funded BFA or MA degree will make up for the language barrier and lack of quality class time. Design education has not only become more expensive and inaccessible but also significantly diminished in quality.

For students who aren’t able to fork up $50,000 on a BFA in Graphic Design, there’s another option: portfolio schools. They are faster-paced, “slick” schools that claim to offer students a job-ready portfolio upon graduation. There’s no world history class or a science lab to fluff up the curriculum. Just some Adobe bootcamps, a few project-based studio classes, a business course, and you’re done!

Online courses and portfolio bootcamps may have democratised design education by providing shorter, more affordable options to aspiring designers. However, the focus on technical skill pigeon-holes design into pure practice. Cutting gen-eds, art history, and foundational art classes from the curriculum may give students more time to learn Adobe, but it inadvertently discourages them from seeking a breadth of knowledge outside of the design world. “Nowadays, the passion of design educators seems to be technology; they fear that computer illiteracy will handicap their graduates,” Michael Beirut prophetically wrote in 1989. “But it’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling.”

Regardless of whether a student graduates from a “process” school or a “portfolio” school, Michael argues that design programmes do a disservice to students who learn to produce results in a cultural vacuum without referring to other disciplines that inform the broader culture. “Our clients usually are not other designers; they sell real estate, cure cancer, make forklift trucks. Nor are there many designers in the audiences our work eventually finds. They must be touched with communication that is genuinely resonant, not self-referential. To find the language for that, one must look beyond Manfred Maier’s Principles of Design or the last Communication Arts Design Annual.” Design schools shouldn’t produce pure robots and Adobe wizards, nor should they produce the other kind of eccentric, navel-gazing designers who only talk to other designers. So what is the solution?

I believe the best design education you can get is the best of both worlds (no Hannah Montana reference intended): one that combines both theory and practice without putting a strain on your current commitments and finances. If you’re just starting out, you don’t need to get into a top private art institution. This could mean taking up an associate’s degree at a community college or portfolio school programme and adding readings from design history to your personal curriculum. (Oversettext has a free list of design essays from pioneers like Jan Tschichold and László Moholy-Nagy.)

If you need more structure, you could commit to a four-year BFA programme at a local public university, which is the path I took. I'm honestly grateful that I received my BFA degree from a state university because I didn’t have to sacrifice my love for history and the social sciences to conform to a strictly studio-based curriculum. If it wasn’t for the several art history and gen-ed courses I was required to take, I don’t think I would have found my niche today as a design and cultural critic.

If you are switching careers, already have a Bachelor’s in a different field, or want to avoid higher ed, you can build a personal curriculum that is specialised to your needs and goals. That being said, don’t make graphic design tutorials on YouTube your only resource. Reach out to designers and design historians/critics in your community, ask them about their education, and ask for their book suggestions and syllabi. Find creatives you like and browse through their work. You can visit arts and design spaces in your area (including museums which have their own design collections). You could also take classes from alternative schools that integrate design with other disciplines like the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC). Or find ways to combine your non-design-related interests (e.g. music, film, literature, politics, comp sci, biology, etc.) into your design practice. Design education is more than just technical know-how. It’s time to acknowledge it as a holistic field that can break down rigid boundaries and challenge what design means beyond conforming to industry.