Is Fashion School Still Worth It?

**Sheena Butler-Young** (0:09)
Hello, and welcome to The Debris from The Business of Fashion where each week we delve into our most popular BoF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler–Young.
For decades, prestigious schools like Central Saint Martins, Polymota, Parsons, SCAD and FIT have helped launch some of the most respected careers across the fashion industry. But the world their graduates are entering looks very different today. AI is changing how entry-level work gets done, and students and their parents are asking tougher questions about the return on investment for a college degree.
Today, fashion schools are under pressure on two fronts, preparing graduates for an industry that's changing fast while making the case that a fashion degree remains worth the cost. Joining me to dig into this is Dan Hastings, BoF Careers' Features Editor. He spent years reporting on what actually gets fashion graduates hired, and he's seen the classroom from the other side, too. Guests lecturing on fashion marketing and sociology at the University of East London, and teaching a course on trend forecasting and consumer behavior at Regents University London. Dan, welcome to the debrief.

**Dan Hastings** (1:20)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (1:22)
So I would love to start this conversation with what I think is one of the most fascinating things I hear when I talk to early career professionals, recent grads and students, and even some professors. They go down this laundry list of frustrations and complaints, and they sound eerily similar to every complaint that I had or heard when I was in college over a decade ago.
What I think is new, and you'll keep me honest here, is the degree or the magnitude of the very same problems. Is there something fundamentally different about today than 10, 15 years ago when it comes to the value of a degree?

**Dan Hastings** (2:00)
Well, it's a huge question, but I would say one thing is the saturation of the courses and of the number of graduates. If we look at the UK and we zoom in on the number of fashion design courses, I did the math and I checked online on UCAS, and there are 213 fashion design courses on the bachelor level. That's three years. On some of these courses, maybe the cohort is just 10 people, but on others, especially in London, like at Central Saint Martins or London College of Fashion, it's closer to 50 people. So if we have as many students graduating every single year, that's closer to 5,000.
So imagine 5,000 fashion design graduates looking for a job at the same time. Do we have these jobs in the industry?

**Sheena Butler-Young** (2:58)
Not to mention the people before them that are probably also not yet employed. So you're kind of adding on top of existing joblessness across the industry. So if 5,000 graduated in 2025, you give the industry another 5,000 this year, where do we actually expect everyone to go, is what you're saying.

**Dan Hastings** (3:17)
Exactly. Yeah. And the industry is not ready for that number of young graduates. And for the graduates themselves, it gets tougher. Because when you look for internships, or when you look for apprenticeships, or just any kind of work experience, your competitors are 4,999 people, which makes it worse. And obviously in London, for instance, what I see a lot of is people looking for internships. Most of them have the financial help to look for unpaid internships, while others don't. Imagine having to do an internship five days a week, and then working on weekends or at night to pay rent. It completely excludes people from working class backgrounds. Even if now they have access to fashion degrees, especially in the UK, where you can borrow money and have that student loan backed up by the government compared to America.
But still, you are completely excluded from that landscape.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (4:16)
It's so interesting because something that I grapple with a lot, and I had a lot of conversations in the past couple of weeks with presidents and deans of some of those fashion schools that I mentioned.
I'm always conflicted on to what extent is some onus on these institutions to acknowledge and reconcile the fact that they charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per year or maybe in total for these degrees, the cost of the degree with the reality of even the entry-level salary of a job and the competitive landscape that they send students out into. So what I mean by that specifically is if you accept people's enrollment and their money, do you have a responsibility to make it very clear, hey, by the way, you're up against maybe a couple years of unemployment when you leave this place. And when you do get that first job, the salary that you're going to earn is likely to be much less than the debt that you've incurred.