The statistics you’ve given are a convincing argument against “arts” in general, but “arts” is a huge range. If you’re graduating a top 5 arts school, you’re generally already in the top percentile, at which point the sample sizes are small and the variance is huge.
The average ROI is very damning, but your choice of school plays a bit role in determining how “average” you are. I’m not arguing in favor of the average art school, I’m defending the ROI of the schools given as examples in the article (Pratt).
That aside, responding to your specific points:
Like a sibling comment implied, it’s not easy to find quality criticism on demand. I stand by this. It’s hard to tell until you’ve been in such an environment, but it really is an order of magnitude’s difference from what you can get online from strangers.
Further, I sort of miscommunicated the value of the environment. It’s more that you’re seeing how other talented people come up with solutions that diverge from your own in fascinating ways. It’s high pressure because everybody is so good, that it demands you to learn and better yourself, not because of deadlines, etc. That was my bad. :P
Finally, while the fundamentals are relatively constant, it’s hard to find them presented in a way that demands 4 semesters of self driven study. I stand by that point.
But yeah, in conclusion I totally agree with the statistics that the average art degree isn’t worth it. The average art position doesn’t require a top 5 degree. The positions that do are remunerative to the extent that they are worth it, in our experience. Finally, not everyone pays the sticker price; in fact, few people (mostly the very wealthy) do.
If there's one thing the internet has taught me, it's that finding legitimate critique about anything is easy and cheap -- just put it out there and ask. There are lots of online art communities that can do this job very well.
High-pressure environments may benefit some people, but people with that kind of drive are likely to push themselves anyway. Plus, an actual commissioned project is way more pressure than any professor could add (at least to me)
Since the principles of art and design don't really change, they can be provided cheaply and easily just as you can find free (and very good) resources on basically every fundamental of programming.
$300,000 paid over a staggering 20 years at 7% interest is $560,000 by the time you're done and you're on the hook for over $2300 every single month or around $28,000 in student loan payments every single year.
(note: these numbers are from salary.com which gives the highest income of all sites I looked at)
The average artist salary seems to be $45,000 to $55,000 per year. 90th percentile salary is only around $72,000. If you're an average artist, more than 50% of your GROSS salary goes toward your student loan and even if you are top-tier, you still wind up paying 39% of your gross toward your loans. Even as an art manager, at 88k at the 50th percentile and 125k at the 90th percentile (not something you're likely to be doing with zero experience), you're going to be in a very tough situation until your mid-40s and that's assuming you don't want to have a family.
In contrast, a low-level HVAC tech makes about as much out the gate without all the debt. A high-level tech makes 62k on average (76 at 90th percentile) while that manager position 72k on average (92k at 90th percentile). An apprenticeship is generally free, but even if you wanted to go to your local community college, you'd be 10-15k out the door at the upper-end. That would be less than $120/mo over 20 years and less than $300/mo over 5 years.
Even a 25th percentile artist will make as much without a degree at 47k per year will be making about as much as a 90th percentile 72k per year paying out 28k every year. Investing the extra 4k every year you save over paying for that degree with a mild 5% ROI gives almost 80k saved for retirement by your mid 40s when your student-loan person is just breaking even. If you've managed to learn the rest of those fundamentals sometime over that last 20 years, you're going to beat that college education by a much larger margin.
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/artist-sala...
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/art-manager...
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/hvac-instal...
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/hvac-mechan...
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/hvac-superv...