The art school debt trap. (illustration by Shari Flores/Hyperallergic) There’s a moment I’ll never forget: Making the Band, early 2000s. Diddy orders a group of hopefuls to walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn to fetch him a cheesecake. The message wasn’t about the cheesecake. It was: If you want access, you’ll jump through any hoop, even degrading ones. That scene, absurd as it is, reflects how many experience art school. You pay in tuition, in labor, in self-doubt, in time, and hope a few crumbs of prestige will trickle down.Art schools are marketed as gateways to success. However, the fine print tells a different story: crushing debt, unreliable outcomes, and a mismatch between what’s promised and what’s delivered. Students are advised that proximity to star faculty, prestige, and facilities will lead to visibility, residencies, teaching jobs, and gallery shows. Some achieve those things. Most leave with loans, little security, and skills that don’t match the marketplace. Beneath the rhetoric is a system designed to sustain institutional prestige, and it runs on debt.To understand how we arrived at this point, it’s helpful to trace two histories: the rise of the MFA and the shift in higher education finance. The MFA became the “terminal degree” for artists in the mid-20th century. By the 1960s, schools like Yale, Iowa, and the newly formed California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) positioned the MFA as both a credential and a mark of prestige. Howard Singerman’s 2023 book Art Subjects describes how studio practice was absorbed into the university, producing not just art but “artists” as a professional category. The MFA wasn’t just a place to make work. It was a way to become legible to the art world and employable in academia.At the same time, the economics of higher education were undergoing significant changes. The Higher Education Act of 1965 expanded federal aid, but mostly through loans. Grants existed, but the balance had shifted. The cost of education increasingly fell on students. By the 1970s and 1980s, this shift hardened. Ronald Reagan, first as California governor and later as US president, championed the idea that higher education was a private investment rather than a public good. In California, he rolled back the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education that had promised free tuition at UC schools. Nationally, his administration cut federal aid, converted grants into loans, and reframed education as an individual responsibility. Christopher Newfield, in Unmaking the Public University (2011), identifies this as the moment when tuition began its steep climb. The result was a new reality: more MFA programs, more students, and more debt. Prestige became the product. Loans became the mechanism. Students, especially those without generational wealth, became collateral.Installation view of Columbia University’s 2023 MFA exhibition ( photo Elaine Velie/Hyperallergic)Art schools thrive on the idea that proximity equals success. Star faculty are advertised like headliners. Facilities like print shops, foundries, and digital labs are marketed as proof of future greatness. Students are told, implicitly or explicitly, that if they buy into the brand, some of that magic will rub off. But does success come from the school, or from the determination and skill of the individual? The question is rarely asked. Instead, schools rely on a feedback loop: a handful of graduates achieve visibility, the school takes credit, and new students enroll, hoping to replicate the path. What was once designed for a small elite has been copied across dozens of programs, without evolving to meet the realities of a very different art world. And here’s the truth: the escalating cost of higher education has always been a way to keep people out. Rising tuition doesn’t just reflect inflation. It replicates a system that treats access to radical thought as something that can only be bought with money.For all the money students pour into art schools, the gaps in training are staggering. I’ve seen undergraduates graduate without knowing what a CV is. I’ve watched MFA students react with shock to learning about the 50/50 gallery split. Most leave with no sense of standard artist fees, how to negotiate contracts, or how to file taxes as freelancers. Programs instead foreground theory and critique. These are valuable, but they’re not enough to sustain an artistic life. Missing are the skills that help artists survive: grant writing, archiving, documenting, shipping, self-advocacy, and learning how to communicate clearly with people outside the bubble. Teachers know they cannot teach someone how to “be” an artist. Yet schools continue to sell that idea. The more honest approach would be to teach students how to honor their creativity in whatever form it takes, while also equipping them with the tools to sustain it.Debt, not talent, is the real gatekeeper. Students who can afford unpaid internships, residencies, or international study programs are at an advantage. Everyone else is left scrambling. The inequities are sharper for Black, Brown, and first-generation students, who often find themselves with mentors who do not share their backgrounds. It’s like seeing a therapist who doesn’t understand your lived experience: you spend more time explaining than advancing. Schools may trumpet diversity, but without structural financial support, these efforts are largely performative. As Sara Ahmed writes in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), diversity often serves as a form of institutional branding. It signals progress without addressing inequities.Here is the cruelest twist: schools extract cultural capital from the very students they fail to support. Black and Brown students are showcased as proof of inclusion, even as they leave with disproportionate debt and fewer opportunities. Success becomes whatever the school decides it is, and those definitions rarely align with the realities of graduates. Meanwhile, the art world thrives on an oversupply of aspiring artists. Like Diddy’s cheesecake walk, the message is clear: There will always be more of you willing to endure debt and scarcity. Galleries and museums benefit from this abundance. Competition is stoked, solidarity is undermined, and artists are kept disposable.It would be dishonest to pretend that art school offers nothing of value. Beautiful things happen there: lifelong friendships, moments of experimentation, the rare critique that changes your practice forever. Art school can give you time, space, and community. The question is whether those things are worth the price. Some would argue yes. But the problem isn’t that art school produces beauty. It’s that it ties that beauty to a system of exclusion and debt. For the amount of money these programs charge, they cannot afford only to offer transcendence. They must also prepare students for survival. If you are already in art school, you are not doomed. However, you do need to be honest with yourself about what you want from the experience. Utilize the network, facilities, time, and access. Leverage every resource while you can, because once you are pushed back out into the world, you will need them.Installation view of Zenobia, “‘Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects (abject) – for Harriet Jacobs’” (2025) at the University of California, Los Angeles’s 2025 MFA exhibition (photo Claudia Ross/Hyperallergic)The MFA is not the only model. There is a long history of artist-run and non-accredited schools that attest to this. Black Mountain College, active from the 1930s through the 1950s, was interdisciplinary by design. Painters studied alongside poets, dancers, and musicians. The line between faculty and students was deliberately blurred. That environment produced collaborations that helped shape American modernism, from Josef and Anni Albers to Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Ruth Asawa. The school showed that rigorous art education could thrive outside accreditation. In 2016, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn hosted the Alternative Art School Fair, which brought together dozens of non-accredited programs from around the world: residencies, critique groups, collectives, online platforms, and hybrid experiments. Among the participants was The Black School, founded by Shani Peters and Joseph Cuillier III. Their work links art to Black politics, education, and community building, and they continue to thrive as they develop a permanent schoolhouse in New Orleans. The Black School also experiments with funding models that reduce reliance on institutional grants. It is an example of how alternative schools think expansively about both pedagogy and sustainability. These histories and experiments show that art school can be both rigorous and imaginative without being tethered to debt. The point is not to crown a new “MFA 2.0.” It is to recognize that there are many ways to learn, build networks, and sustain a practice.The art school debt trap persists because it benefits everyone but the students. Institutions get tuition and cultural capital. The art world gets a steady supply of indebted labor. Wealthy students maintain their advantage. Artists from less-resourced backgrounds are left navigating systems that were never designed to support them. Breaking the loop means refusing to see art school as the only path to legitimacy. It means demanding outcome transparency, embedding survival skills alongside theory and critique, and valuing non-accredited, collective models as seriously as MFAs. It also means remembering how policy shifts, like Reagan’s push to privatize education, still shape who gets to study art today.Art schools will not save us. They are not designed to. They will continue extracting as long as possible. The challenge, and the opportunity, is for artists to build parallel systems of support, rooted in honesty, solidarity, and care. Because the truth is: We don’t need to walk across a bridge with cheesecake in hand to prove we belong here. We already do.