A question I get asked a lot is some form of
Is film school worth it?
It’s a complicated question that every person has to answer for themselves, but I wanted to focus on one aspect of it which I like to call the Film School Paradox: as the cost of making films goes down, the cost of film school goes up.
The absurdly high cost of a graduate education in the United States continues to rise with no end in sight. A recent article in the New York Times gives a dire prognostication:
With unemployment soaring, higher education has never been more important to society or more widely desired. But the collapse of our public education system and the skyrocketing cost of private education threaten to make college unaffordable for millions of young people. If recent trends continue, four years at a top-tier school will cost $330,000 in 2020, $525,000 in 2028 and $785,000 in 2035.
Seven-hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars!
UCLA holds a unique position at the eye of California’s budgetary storm, with tuition having gone up nearly $7,000 in the two years I’ve been here. As I’ve mentioned earlier, this development heavily contributed to my decision to graduate a year early.
That being said, if you look at the top five film schools and their respective tuitions, UCLA is actually somewhat affordable:
- NYU (With Insurance Fees) $48,020
- Columbia (First and Second Year) $50,873
- AFI $42,329
- USC $40,960
- UCLA (In-State) $23,000
But it’s still a lot of moolah! For one year’s tuition at any of these schools, you could easily buy a nice camera package or even finance a whole feature (see my microbudget list).
With recent developments in digital technology, it seems like an increasingly viable option to go and shoot your own feature or short without paying forty grand a year. What to do with that feature after it’s done, or how to get the money to make it is outside the scope of this article.
In the old days, film students went to school to gain access to prohibitively expensive thirty-five and sixteen millimeter cameras. Those days are officially gone; this year all major manufacturers announced that they will no longer make film cameras. Meanwhile the new RED Scarlet, with accessories, sells for $15,000.
This is the film school paradox; as the difficulty and expense involved in making films decline, the cost of a film school education continues to rise. Or as William Butler Yeats put it:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Film school can offer mentorship, feedback, a professional network, peer relationships, technical training and time to work on your craft. All of these are incredibly valuable, but it will be interesting to see at which price point film school applications drop off, if they haven’t already.
A Graduate MFA Directing student who becomes a top director is statistically comparable to an MBA becoming a CEO at a Fortune 500 company. But my guess is that most top-tier MBAs who don’t become CEOs have far fewer problems paying off their student loans.
I still believe that a film school education can be worth $100,000, but as the prices continue to soar high above that mark, students will be increasingly faced with the serious choice of whether two to seven hundred thousand dollars, or the price of most features in Sundance’s low-budget NEXT section, is really worth it.
What do you think, can the falcon hear the falconer?
