From the group of guys and girls I left secondary school with, a number of us have gone on to study something related to games in 3rd level education in a number of different colleges. I really think misrepresentation of courses and course content is a serious problem. just think of the situation
You have a 17/18 year old leaving school with little or no experience of the real world. The sources of information for a prospective student are as follows (please correct me if i miss any) and all of them have their problems.
1: College prospectus
Well its published by the college and its a sales pitch basically. Its not impartial and subject modules with headings such as Software Design doesn’t tell you if its appropriate for or even what part of the games industry its aimed at (is it developing an engine or building an application with middle ware?) or if they investigate the area in enough detail. Is one module in my second year enough time dedicated to graphics and physical modeling? Audio module’s…is this editing and composition of sound or implementation? The person is 17 and is probably going to make an assessment on limited experience and its probably going to be pretty naive.
2: Magazines (Edge, Games TM, ect)
Magazines occasionally run articles on college courses, and Edge runs student/college profiles. These nearly always have a positive spin and offer very little detailed information on the course and to the best of my knowledge they don’t highlight any of the negative aspects of a college or course.
3: Open days
I myself have been give some dubious at best information at open days and I have heard horror story’s of lecturers openly lie about course content. It is easy enough to make a course sound attractive to a naive 17/18 year old with dreams of making games with out telling them lies. Also you rarely get to meet all the lecturers on an open day and you have no way of assessing their teaching ability or dedication other than a very quick chat if your lucky.
4: Current and Ex students of the colleges
Ah the best hope of getting accurate information on a course….or not. Students lie or don’t know what they are talking about, maybe he/she is disgruntled because they feel they didn’t get the grade they deserve, or have bought into the course heart and soul and think that the teachers can do no wrong or maybe are just trying to convince themselves.
5: Websites (such as this one)
Well some of the information in the courses section of this site is out of date. The Game carer guide on Gamasutra seems pretty good ( I haven’t read much on it so please correct me if I’m wrong) but if you do a search for a college in the UK or Ireland you get a small paragraph of prospectus style information.
So a lot of students go into college with misconceptions and are putting their faith in the academic institution to at least give the opportunity to gain the skills to enter the industry, and a lot of colleges seem to be letting them down. From talking to friends in several colleges both in the UK and Ireland I’m of the opinion that very few colleges are offering an all round good course, but some seem to be at offering something decent, I’ll see how accurate this opinion is when I finish college. I’ll either have a job or I wont.
(please before someone roasts me alive for saying this…its not my opinion I’m only trying to highlight some of the opinions of students and I’m not having a go at any ANYONE or ANY COLLEGE)
As for the point of also training students for the wider multimedia industry rather than just focusing just on the Games industry, I have studied multimedia in college before moving onto games and there are many similarities but also some differences so I think colleges that are teaching modules with adaptability need to highlight this. I have also spoken to some students in a number of colleges that are of the opinion that this can just be an excuse for a college to teach the stuff their staff are good at in the way they like, pertinent or not to the games industry…or to give the staff their contracted hours.
Yes in every class there will always be students that don’t work, hand up sub standard assignment and still expect to be handed a job at the other end. So i guess the industry will always receive applications from time wasters.
To sum it up:
The opinion of some of the students I have talked to is that it is really difficult to get accurate information on a course or college.
The Industry doesn’t seem to be communicating to the colleges what they want or the colleges are ignoring them.
Crops of lazy and poorly trained grads have soured the industry against hiring graduates in the future.
I don’t think this will be solved until there is a transparent system for assessing the performance and standards of college’s and the Industry spells out it’s requirements in big easy to read letters because the message isn’t getting across, if it was a highly skilled work force would be pouring out of colleges.
This is just a collection of opinions from some of the students I have talked to, I am still student and in college to learn, so if anyone disagrees with what is said here please correct me!