Rating:(1/10)

Review:

Attended: 1995
Recommend: No

The Art Institute of Dallas is one of several schools owned by the Art Institutes International. I know they have schools in Florida, Pittsburgh, Denver and Seattle. They offer an Associates degree (two year degree) in only 18 months. In a nut shell, they are a private school concerned more about you paying your bills (or qualifying for gauranteed grants and loans) than they are about education.

They have good equipment, but limit your opportunity to use it effectively. For example, shooting projects consist of going out into the parking lot or downtown to a crowded street and shooting whatever might happen to be going on. Students cannot take equipment off the school property without an instructor present.

The instructors leave alot to be desired. A couple of my instructors were very good unfortunately, one of them left after I'd had him for only one class (he was the only one I felt really knew his stuff.) But several of the instructors have little or no real world experience. They are not required to stay active in the production community so most of them don't. Where at most colleges, an instructor must have at least a Masters degree, this place has instructors who have never even been to college! Many of the instructors are graduates of their OWN PROGRAM! This "inbreeding" just leads to uninformed idiots who don't know their heads from a hole in the ground. One of the instructors graduated with his AA degree from the AI of Dallas and went and got his Bachelor degree from the Florida version of the same school. He came back to teach in Dallas and doesn't know the first thing about film or video.

To their credit, I think the instructors are overworked. They must teach at least six 4 hour courses a week and prepare on their own time. They do not have adequate facilities or offices for counseling and reviewing projects.

Although they only teach video, I hear they are starting to offer at least one course that talks about film, but I don't know much about it. The program is so accelerrated and so many of the students are underacheiving simpletons who barely made it out of high school, it simply makes for a dificult environment to learn, even from the one or two good instructors. The projects they have seem to be designed around the limitations of using the equipment.

On the non-technical side, the building looks like a bathroom. They let smokers crowd around the one entrance to the building so you can't breath as you walk in from the parking lot. The equipment check out procedures are cumbersome. They make everyone take a set schedule of classes, no matter what your interest. They don't want to let you transfer in credit from real colleges because it means less courses from them that you will have to pay for. Overall, the school was not worth the money. In a year and a half it costs about $25,000. For that I could buy my own camera and make my own film and have something to show for it. I don't know anything about the other schools owned by the Art Institutes company, but if they are anything like the one in Dallas you had better stear way clear.

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Note: This review was auto-imported from an older LOAFS database. A "Yes" recommendation has been translated into a rating of ten. A "No" has been translated into a rating of one.
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Review Submitted by: Anonymous (unverified)