I don’t know how many design students are being pumped out of D-schools globally every year. My estimate is for US an Canada alone, we are talking about 180+ four-year under grad and one-year grad programs conferring B.A. , B.Des, B.F.A. and M.F.A degrees. About 5,500 are graduated annually. This doesn’t include associate degrees and design diploma, if we start including those, we are talking about 30,000+ students graduating every year US and Canada alone. These numbers may be off. I wonder how many of these graduates actually find work in the design field and how many did make a serious career in design? If we ignore production design work, how many are actually working as a design thinker?
My conversation with D-school deans is that we estimate that less than 45% of graduates actually find a job in design related field within the first year. And over 55% of B.A., B.Des, and B.F.A. graduates or diplomas holders actually quit design within a year after graduation. Over 70% of M.F.A. grads actually continue their design career. That number is certainly higher than engineers and accountants.
There are many reasons, here are enough design jobs around and many programs provide inadequate job counseling. These young people are not well prepared for the workplace. There isn’t a lot of collaboration between D-schools or Engineering Schools not to mention intern partnership with large organizations. The quality of the students is also a challenge, while the straight As students usually for an engineering or medicine career, many who are end up in D-schools are not the brightest thinker and problem solvers, they merely study design to learn the craft, and don’t have intellectual power to solve the world’s biggest problem. My guess is less than 5% in an undergrad design program are bright enough and aspire to take on larger challenge than making a pretty poster or brochure.
There is a tremendous demand for design thinkers today. In industry and in consulting (like Idea Couture), those who can marry creative right-brain thinking and analytical left-brain thinking are at a premium. That's because innovation often happens not in the center of a discipline but in the space between disciplines, and right now a lot of new value is being found at the intersection of design, technology and business. So who is going to lead this new world of design? You might think that D-schools would have the strongest claim. That’s definitely not the case. I hope this doesn’t upset some of my friends, it will take a very different kind of design education to produce people who can apply design thinking to solve business problems. D-school can use some design thinking to reinvent themselves.
Dyson, a keen supporter of design (who ditched plans to found his own design school) is finding alternative ways to support design education. The cash, which releases £1.6m of match-funding from the UK Government, is the biggest single donation that the Royal College of Art has ever received. Dyson says he is concerned that the Government is not doing enough to support UK manufacturing. He made an interesting point about design employment. He tells The Observer, ‘You often hear of British designers who’ve gone abroad and designed things for Apple, Volvo, Sony and so on, but if we are able to go on training very good designers, and manufacturing is given the right sort of support by the Government, we can turn the tide and start exporting more than we import – and have great fun in the process.’
Design can revitalize industries, if I am running a government, I would carefully craft a plan to incentivise designers and use them to create industries. Designers can create a lot of jobs, if politicians are smart about it.
