Fine-art programmes in New York City are enjoying a record surge in student applications, according to reporting from Hannah Frishberg at the local news outlet Gothamist. Despite staggering tuition costs and the relative precarity of creative vocations, young adults are flocking to the arts across the city and country.
As the ingress of artificial intelligence (AI) has sent shock waves through the working lives of Americans, young people have identified the arts as a human way to combat economic scarcity. The high-school class of 2025 is the largest in US history; while sheer numbers may translate to more applications, experts in the field say that the uptick represents more than just statistics.
"There are ways to make a life that is still rooted in creative work," Dahlia Elsayed, the fine-arts programme director of LaGuardia Community College in Queens, told Gothamist. "They're all still making art but they're also making money. Having a creative life exists beyond a studio practice."
Jane South, the fine arts chair at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, agreed. “Especially when the world is so unstable and insecure, I think that art is a place of reflection, resistance and imagination,” she said. “It’s not something that just reflects the world. It really helps us to make sense of it."
Rapid geopolitical and technological changes have shifted generational perspectives on once-secure career paths like computer science and law, and as interest in trade schools continues to rise, so too does curiosity about material, haptic work in the arts.
Sara Greenberger Rafferty, the chair of Hunter College's art and art-history department, noted that high-school students aren’t “having shop class, they're not learning how to make ceramics. So they can come and do that in college”.
A 25-year-old Pratt painting student named Manar Balh told Gothamist that the surge in applications could be related to a growing corporate pessimism among young people attempting to enter the workforce. “A lot of my peers understand that nothing is guaranteed really, no matter what you study, so you should just study the thing that matters the most to you,” Balh said. “AI doesn't feel like a reason to stop making art. If anything, it’s a reason to keep making and insist on making art.”
Data from Business Insider reveals that Gen Z is entering the workforce at the worst possible time—between AI-induced layoffs and economic uncertainty, unemployment rates have spiked for recent graduates to unprecedented levels. As the return on investment for bachelor’s degrees becomes more abstract, Gen Z has adopted a different attitude towards higher education. In a 2018 report, 43% of Gen Zers said that college prepares students for “life in general”.
“I don’t think young people today buy the myth of capitalism,” Elsayed told Gothamist. "They are seeing a doom-and-gloom world presented to them and [think], 'Why not go and create a life that is meaningful, where you have community and a real sense of doing something constructive and creative and positive in the face of all this?'"
