I was teaching part time in 2007 and I asked the studios what they complained about. Two things, and one of them was a word they used more than once. The work was not good enough, and the graduates were entitled.
Both of those sound like curriculum. Teach harder, mark stricter, raise the bar. That is the obvious fix and it is the wrong one.
Nobody arrives at eighteen entitled. A room teaches it.
Think about who was in that room. A student makes something and one person sees it. That person assigns the grade, and that person is paid out of the tuition.
There is nobody in the building who can say no and mean it. The complaint was never about the students. It was about the audience.
So the question stopped being how to teach them better.
You cannot teach humility. You can introduce a client.
In term three, before students chose a specialism, we put real clients in front of them. Around fifty nonprofits over the years. A Habitat for Humanity ReStore. A cancer ride. A provincial health campaign about antibiotics that ran on the side of buses.
Then industry mentors, and an advisory board of working practitioners, so critique came from people with nothing invested in the student feeling good.
Then a term six industry night: three minutes each, to a room of people who hire.
And a forty-eight hour brief every class ran together, with no marks attached, because marks were the thing distorting it.
Source: the programme model, June 2014. Eight tabs, 545 rows, one file carrying the academic view, the cost model and the admissions copy off the same spine.
Four and a half times the homework of anything else in the term. I knew it would eat their other coursework and I put it there anyway.
Term three is where we taught producing and project management. I wanted the trade-off happening to them while we taught it, not described to them in a slide.
Low stakes. One term later they made the same call on the graduate project, where it counted.
A failure they could afford, upstream of the one they could not.
Then the graduate project, which is the part I would keep if I could only keep one.
They came into it with base skills and a plan. And they wrote the criteria they would be evaluated against. We helped them think it through. We did not hand them a rubric.
They could change scope if they wanted to. At the midpoint check-in, as a conversation, with a reason. What they could not do was quietly stop doing the thing they had committed to.
That is the entire difference between guidance and autonomy, and it turns out to be one date in a calendar.
Terms four and five went deep into the specialty. In term six they finished, and then we taught them a set of things a design school does not usually teach.
How to pitch a portfolio. How to negotiate. Business law, and ethics.
Not so they could get hired. So they could choose who they worked for.
None of that works if the school is still telling them the grade is the point. So I said the opposite, out loud, to every incoming cohort.
School is a game. In some places grades matter. Here your portfolio matters.
You need 64.5% to pass this program. Make sure you do.
That is not a lowered standard. It is a relocated one. I told them the exact floor, and that everything above the floor was theirs to spend wherever it compounded.
Then I did the arithmetic with them personally. Running total, what was still needed to graduate, and their choice. A student holding a profit and loss on their own degree.
Sixty-four point five was the threshold. Nobody was grading the thing that decided their career.
Some of them will hear that and coast. I knew that when I said it, and I said it anyway.
That is the real cost and it is not the only one. The people above me were alarmed at times, and backed it, because the programme produced the widest range of work in the school.
Employment figures as the school reported them. The share-of-students split is my estimate, not a counted figure.
Motion was the weakest stream for hiring, and that was supply and demand rather than teaching. Nobody was hiring motion at the rate the software companies were hiring interaction designers.
So the share of students in the weakest stream fell by fifteen points, and the share in the strongest rose by the same fifteen. Part of that jump is teaching. Part of it is arithmetic.
I do not think the second part is a cheat. I told every cohort early and plainly what the hiring market actually looked like, and students moved. That is a real intervention.
It is just not the intervention the headline implies. Telling a nineteen-year-old the truth about demand is a different act from teaching them better, and only one of them is what a reader hears in 45 to 79.
The UX curriculum did get better. I am confident about that and I cannot separate it cleanly from the mix.
So I am giving you both, and you can decide what the number is worth.
The curriculum did have to change alongside all of this, and I paid for it without asking for more budget. Graduate mentor sessions went from nine to six, and the money went into building courses nobody else was teaching.
That was defensible on its own terms. A project has a rhythm: kickoff, then two weeks where a check-in buys nothing and the time between concept and direction buys a lot. It is also a different conversation once the student wrote the criteria.
But the curriculum was the easier half. A syllabus can teach a technique. It cannot teach a person that the work is not for them.