Established designers are raising serious concerns about the declining state of design education, warning that current programs are leaving graduates unprepared for industry realities while burdening them with substantial debt. Multiple top professionals have observed a marked deterioration in educational quality over recent years, creating a troubling mismatch with an increasingly competitive job market.
"Design education is fucked," declared Andu Masebo, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2021 with a master's in Design Products. "It's so bad, I don't know if it should be fixed. I think we should tear it down and refashion it into a completely new model. From my experience, all of it but one tutor was a nightmare." Tom Lloyd, co-founder of Pearson Lloyd, echoed these concerns, stating, "The quality of design education is lower than it was 25 years ago, and it's more expensive."
Jo Barnard, who founded design agency Morrama at age 24, emphasized the growing disconnect between education and employment prospects. "I do think we're in an age now where students can't just go and get a degree and walk into a job," she explained. Barnard identified a critical lack of connection between university courses and the creative working world as a primary issue. "I think that there should be a closer relationship between design and business at an educational level, so that people can understand the implications of what it is that they're creating from a business perspective."
The oversaturation of design programs has become another significant concern. "There are too many design courses, and there are too many courses that don't have a really strong connection with industry," Barnard continued. "There are students doing three years of a design course, but at no point do they even get a week of work experience. For me, that feels so wrong." She advocated for mandatory industry experience, arguing, "It should be a requirement that you can't graduate without some form of experience in the industry. Without that experience, it's really hard to get a job."
Masebo attributed the declining quality to the commercialization of academia. "What it has done is turned design education into something that only makes sense if it pays back," he said. "So you kind of step into it thinking like, well, I'm doing this so I can get a job, and it's not really what you should be doing when you go to design school." He emphasized that proper design education should focus on personal development rather than job preparation: "You don't do a master's to build a network or learn skills. You go to make sense of the things that have gone into your melting pot before you got to the master's. Like, what is my cultural heritage? Who are my friends? How do I think? What excites me?"
The lack of sustainability education has also become apparent in the job market. Barnard observed this after advertising for a junior role and receiving over 200 applications. "The quality was quite high, which means that there's a lot of people out there who just don't have work," she noted. "I noticed that a lot of the applications made no or very little reference to sustainability, despite the fact that Morrama positions itself as a company that prioritizes it quite highly. Which for me suggests that students are not receiving the education that gives them any foundation to say they have any knowledge in this area."
Both designers agreed that university staff are not receiving adequate support. "The money side of it is the biggest problem," Masebo explained. "You've got these padded institutions where most of the people who work for them aren't teachers. The best people on my course were the most underfunded and the most stretched. Teachers aren't getting paid properly and have too many students." Barnard added, "There are courses out there where there's not even live briefs set by actual businesses. So it's just teachers who may or may not have, at some point, actually practiced design themselves, tutoring students on what they think is the best thing for them to be doing."
The traditional promise of networking opportunities through education has also proven unreliable. "I don't know if I believe in that so much," Masebo reflected, noting that his professional network formed through social settings with people from diverse creative disciplines. "There's very little support from the industry or from designers who have had success where they explain things like, 'this is how this thing works, meet this person, here's a manufacturer you could work with'. There's very little of that."
The designers acknowledged that the current landscape necessitates questioning the fundamental purpose of design education and considering alternative pathways. "From a skills perspective, you can kind of teach yourself these days," Barnard observed. "There are so many courses out there for free, and so much stuff on YouTube that you could learn how to use. You can get yourself around the Adobe Suite, KeyShop, Blender – whatever it might be. You don't need to go to university to learn the actual tools. And you could read a bunch of books. But without that industry experience, it's really hard to get a job."
Looking forward, the industry professionals emphasized the need for prospective students to make more informed decisions about their educational investments. "I think that people who are 18 and looking to go into design need to know when a course is not worth doing and spending that fortune on," Barnard concluded. The warnings from these established designers highlight the urgent need for fundamental reforms in design education to better serve both students and the industry they hope to enter.
