Is Fashion School Still Worth It?

0:08Sheena Butler-Young: Hello and welcome to The Debrief from the Business of Fashion where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler-Young. For decades, prestigious schools like Central Saint Martins, Polymoda, Parsons, SCAD, and FIT have helped launch some of the most respected careers across the fashion industry. But the world their graduates are entering looks very different today. AI is changing how entry-level work gets done, and students and their parents are asking tougher questions about the return on investment for a college degree.

0:46Sheena Butler-Young: Today, fashion schools are under pressure on two fronts, preparing graduates for an industry that's changing fast while making the case that a fashion degree remains worth the cost. Joining me to dig into this is Dan Hastings, BOF Careers Features Editor. He spent years reporting on what actually gets fashion graduates hired and he's seen the classroom from the other side too, guest lecturing on fashion marketing and sociology at the University of East London and teaching a course on trend forecasting and Consumer Behavior at Regents University London. Dan, welcome to The Debrief. Thank you so much for having me.

1:22Sheena Butler-Young: So I would love to start this conversation with what I think is one of the most fascinating things I hear when I talk to early career professionals, recent grads and students, and even some professors. They go down this laundry list of frustrations and complaints, and they sound eerily similar to every complaint that I had or heard when I was in college over a decade ago. what I think is new and you'll keep me honest here is the degree or the magnitude of the very same problems is there something fundamentally different about today than 10-15 years ago when it comes to the value of a degree well it's a huge question I would say one thing is the saturation of the courses and of the number of graduates.

2:11If we look at the UK and we zoom in on the number of fashion design courses, I did the math and I checked online on UCAS and there are 213 fashion design courses on a bachelor level. That's three years. On some of these courses, maybe the cohort is just 10 people, but on others, especially in London, like at Central St. Martins or London College of Fashion, it's closer to 50 people. So if we have as many students graduating every single year, that's closer to 5 ,000. So imagine 5 ,000 fashion design graduates looking for a job at the same time. Do we have these jobs in the industry?

2:57Sheena Butler-Young: Not to mention the people before them that are probably also not yet employed. So you're kind of adding on top of existing joblessness across the industry. So 5 ,000 graduated in 2025, you give the industry another 5 ,000 this year, where do we actually expect everyone to go is what you're saying. exactly yeah and the industry is not ready for that number of young graduates and for the graduates themselves it gets tougher because when you look for internships or when you look for apprenticeships or just any kind of work experience your competitors are 4 ,999 people which makes it worse and obviously in London for instance what I see a lot of is people looking for internships, most of them have the financial help to look for unpaired internships, while others don't.

3:51Imagine having to do an internship five days a week and then working on weekends or at night to pay rent. It completely excludes people from working class backgrounds, even if now they have access to fashion degrees, especially in the UK, where you can borrow money and have that student loan backed up by the government compared to America. but still you are completely excluded from that landscape.

4:15Sheena Butler-Young: It's so interesting because something that I grapple with a lot, and I had a lot of conversations in the past couple of weeks with presidents and deans of some of those fashion schools that I mentioned, I'm always conflicted on to what extent is some onus on these institutions to acknowledge and reconcile the fact that they charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per year or maybe in total for these degrees, right? The cost of the degree with the reality of even the entry-level salary of a job and the competitive landscape that they send students out into. So what I mean by that specifically is if you accept people's enrollment and their money, do you have a responsibility to make it very clear, hey, by the way, you're up against maybe a couple years of unemployment when you leave this place.

5:07Sheena Butler-Young: And when you do get that first job, the salary that you're going to earn is likely to be much less than the debt that you've incurred. It's always a surprise to some students when I share with them the reality of the salaries in fashion. I did a guest lecture on the future of fashion journalism for the University of South Wales a year ago. and one of the part of the lecture includes a quiz like a kahoot quiz on some questions around the history of fashion journalism etc etc and one question that I added was what is the starting salary of a fashion writer at Marie Claire in London in 2025 and the answer shocked all of them because it was something like 26k which is insanely low most of them got the answer wrong so I mean many of them are really young and they are just not aware at all of this and they grew up watching the devil wears Prada and Gossip Girl and they think that they can have a good salary and make a good living but when you ask them about what kind of jobs do you want and how much money will you charge for it or what kind of salaries are you looking for they come up with insane numbers which really shows a complete disconnection between what they learn at school and what people and what they think they know and the reality of the market.

6:32Sheena Butler-Young: For sure. I mean, I've had this conversation with even my peers or people in management and fashion, and they found that a lot of entry-level talent comes into the industry. Example, expecting to have a meeting with the CEO on the first week. And that sounds like I'm creating this very prestigious hierarchy, but you get what I'm saying. It's that there's sometimes a disconnect between their understanding or their desire for a certain kind of career and then the reality. Do you think that the industry has gotten also just more difficult, like the slowing growth across luxury and retail? I mean, I guess that's a fact.

7:09Sheena Butler-Young: It's a fact that the industry itself has gotten more challenging. How does that affect the value of a college education? Is it less about the degree's value and more about the reality of what the industry has been up against? well it's it's i see the exact same landscape in fashion and in journalism like when i was in journalism school 10 years ago this year everyone was talking about how there are no jobs anymore influencers have stolen the jobs of fashion writers no one is interesting in reading anymore that was the conversation back in 2016 and we see the same thing in fashion now people telling us do not work in marketing, do not study fashion communications because there are no jobs anymore.

7:53And I think it's obviously the slow growth has a huge impact. We are seeing hiring freezes in so many companies. Others are just deciding to stick to the workforce they have at the moment. I think Walmart, not luxury or not fashion, but said a year ago that they would stick to the same headcount for the next three years um so we are seeing this across the board and it does have an impact on the value of a fashion degree what is interesting is that it means that what you learn at school and who you are and the skills that you learn on your own are kind of like on the same level now like if you look at jobs opening in social media for instance it's no longer enough to just know how to write an Instagram post.

8:43You need to know how to shoot pictures, edit, edit on Canva, on Premiere, on After Effects, and then understand the strategy side and then understand how to analyze audience data. And all of these skills that perhaps you did not learn through your degree in communications or in fashion marketing are things that you learn on your own and they have perhaps a bigger impact on your application when you look for a job in social media. I feel like that's the difference.

9:16Sheena Butler-Young: So, you know, it's so interesting, as you were talking about the skills that students might gain in college and how they sometimes don't match the jobs that they end up having, it made me think about something I hear from a lot of educators, which is that we've put a lot of emphasis on what is, you know, it's a realistic and should probably be the leading deliverable of a college degree, which is to get a job. But there's other parts of that pie. For me, I will say I graduated college journalism school during a recession. And I was very frustrated with the year it took me to get was or maybe it was less than a year, like I think it was six to eight months.

9:54Sheena Butler-Young: And that felt like forever when you don't have, you know, generational wealth to fall back on. I was very frustrated, but I never once thought that my degree was a waste of money because it delivered some other things like critical thinking. And a lot of the skills that I use today came from that. And I think it matters. The job stuff matters. And I eventually did get a job and look at me now, Dan, but, but you get, I did get the job and, and grew my career, but I actually thought what ended up being ultimately more valuable was the skills, the, you know, helping me figure out what I want to do in life, helping me, you know, learn how to ask tough questions and, you know, be a collaborative team player and all of those things.

10:36Sheena Butler-Young: Do you think students and maybe people generally have undervalued those other parts of the of the puzzle? Or is it like Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Like you got to get the job first and I'll care about everything else. Oh, it's a good question. I feel like from my experience, when they choose a university, for instance, many of them choose based on the degree but others also choose based on the location and the student life and like I went to Falmouth University last year and it's close to the sea and the lifestyle that you have in a city like that is so much more different from what you live in London so the experience of being at university on campus and the skills that you learn while you talk to strangers and build friendships and work um like i was in the cinema um association and the fashion student union those skills i've learned along the way how to throw a fashion show with no budget um how to like really learn how to do really tiny things but that have an impact down the line that's part of the student life as well and it's part of the degree also it's not written down on the leaflet.

11:52And I feel like some students really still think about this when they choose the school that they want to go to. But parents always ask, is it worth it? And are you sure you want to go into debt to go to this school? Or have you seen whether students who graduated from here landed really good jobs and who are the alumni that made a living in a career after this degree so um definitely the soft skills do matter and i do think the students know about them and are looking for that life experience as well especially for those with if you if we think about the students who are starting next semester they were so young during covid still in secondary school probably so they perhaps they never had the opportunity to work in an office full-time They will never do that, probably, for most of them.

12:44And so that life experience of meeting new people, being in a new city, leaving your parents behind, which is a huge part of college life, they still cherish that.

12:56Sheena Butler-Young: Do you think certain schools still get resumes to the top of the pile today the way that they did 10, 15 years ago? And I'm going to say that as if that's a fact because I think it's true. whether it's the alumni network or name recognition the the schools I listed early on the central St. Martins of the world FIT the network that lets you as a student your name is seen this that's my alma mater so I want to I have an affinity right away for you if I'm the hiring manager does that exist today to the same degree that it did 10 years ago it's a good question on the relationship you create when you come from the same school as a recruiter, but on the schools that still matter.

13:41I think, because I'm French, I'm probably quite biased, but IFM in Paris, it's the French Institute of Fashion. It was co-created, well, co-chaired by Pierre Berger, who was the co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent. And he's now, the president of IFM is now Sidney Toledano, who used to be the CEO of Dior and is now the CEO of LVMH Fashion. That school, for instance, is really tough to get into. They're extremely selective. And their alumni network and even the scholarships that huge luxury brands award to their students are really impressive. And when you have a foot inside the door, you can really connect with really amazing people.

14:24And then on design, There was a really good piece about La Cambre, which is a Belgian fashion design school in the Financial Times a few days ago. And it was about the graduate show and how this school specifically is known for being extremely difficult. They have 15 to 20 seats in the first year. And then as they advance, some people give up because it's so tough or because they fail their exams. It's incredibly difficult. So they had the graduate show this year in the summer and a headhunter from Louis Vuitton was there, according to the FT. So that's how you see that some schools still have some kind of status that attract these huge luxury brands and really open up opportunities for these students.

15:12Sheena Butler-Young: That's a great point. It's not I think the way that some might see it is that it's like the name for the sake of the name. You're describing a level of rigor and training and then access that is probably not available across the board. Well, it's not available across the board. The other thing that I think reflects change that is maybe not new, but it changes the content of something that's always existed, which is that the industries keep changing. So AI is one of the biggest examples of that. when you prepare students in a college setting to go out into the world, something like artificial intelligence, generative AI is one of the biggest, most disruptive things we've seen, not in just the industry, but in the world.

15:57Sheena Butler-Young: Like the way that my mom sends an email now just to Walmart for a return because she now has a tool. Like I used to write those emails for her. Now I don't have to. So you have these kinds of tools. You have something like AI that's changed things. You of the creator economy, where students would come to school, one of the professors that I spoke to described it, I think it was the dean of the fashion school at Central St. Martin's, that students come to school and they expect that the door to a career is at least more ajar than it would have been had they not gone to school. But if the goal is to have access to a career and to it being lucrative, you can do that on social media.

16:40Sheena Butler-Young: And should you have a degree to make you better at that? Maybe, but it's not required to be an influencer. No one's asking to see your college transcript. How do you think colleges should be responding to that kind of shift? Well, from my experience, all of them are questioning and wondering how do they train these students on AI. And it's not just universities. We know that employers are also wondering how the hell do we train people on AI? We actually spoke to Heba Youssef, who is a chief people officer and has own HR podcast. And she told us that because AI evolves so fast, if you start the process to create a training program, it becomes instantly obsolete because it so fast.

17:32So I think the universities are dealing with the exact same issue. And one thing that we are seeing also is that when it comes to marking dissertations or tests, because students all use AI, it becomes incredibly difficult to make sure that they understood the lessons and the topics that we're trying to teach them and make sure that when they leave with the degree, they actually master these skills like I remember when I was doing a workshop with some students and I gave each table a country and I asked them to find one trend in fashion beauty or luxury that feels fresh and new to a western audience so I gave someone Iraq and someone else Philippines and one person had Japan and they came up with a really interesting insight but my question was how did you find it?

18:26And the answer was just, I looked on chat GPT. And so that means the whole process of research, curiosity, asking the right questions, having the ability to know what's fresh from what's not fresh, all of that work of analysis, we are not sure that they will leave the degree with these skills anymore. And so that's extremely tricky. And then on the social media thing many students i have spoken with think that it can open many more doors than a university degree but they also know that it's incredibly difficult to grow on social media because everything is saturated now and they understand this platform so well to the extent that some students tell me they do not use tiktok because they're scared of being addicted to it um so it Really, it's fascinating.

19:16And then when it comes to their usage of AI, obviously they use it, but they are really, really specific on how they want fashion brands to use AI. And what we have seen in our BOF careers survey, which the results will publish really soon, is that across a thousand people that we interviewed who work in fashion or aspire to work in fashion, the cohort that is the most AI anxious and feel that AI is more negative regarding its impact on the industry is aspiring fashion workers so Gen Z who are under 25 years old.

19:55Sheena Butler-Young: That is very fascinating and you know when you were speaking about AI and the college curriculum and how fast it's changing it made me think that I believe that we're sometimes asking the wrong questions of colleges and even companies when it comes to training around AI and implementing it. What I heard from a lot of professors and deans is that obviously AI is in the curriculum. Obviously, we're weaving it into how we do things, right? So they know that their students are consulting ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude when they work or when they research and all of that. But a lot of what it takes to use AI isn't that tough.

20:35Sheena Butler-Young: It's very like if you follow these few steps, you'll get the information or the results. Where the training and skills development is actually more important is everything else you listed. We should be teaching students curiosity, judgment, cultural nuance, how to be collaborative, that sort of thing, not necessarily how do you engineer a prompt for the latest AI thing because it's all like that's actually the easiest thing for lack of a better word the easiest thing to learn it's everything else that's become tougher and I think the challenge for a lot of schools as you've just said is to how do you teach people to be curious how do you I mean college has always been good for critical thinking but how do you engineer that when people can get answers so quickly it's really difficult I always end my lectures with one quote from the AI editor at Fortune.

21:30His name is Jeremy Kahn. And I feel like this quote always really keeps me inspired. And so I hope that they find it inspiring too. And he says, AI may put a premium on humans who can operate as artists on the avant-garde, because that will seem very refreshing to people. It will be something they can't get from AI. but the question is how do people discover that and it always helps me to just teach them this is where this is what you need to work on what makes you better than ai and what are the things that will make me go as a recruiter oh this person just said something that i had never heard of before they're interesting maybe i should work with them it's very true what do you think

22:21Sheena Butler-Young: about old school tactile skills like sewing and draping and craftsmanship and all of that, there's a lot of conversation about, to your point just now, about these things that were traditional or maybe even people turned their nose up at for a long time in favor of technical skills. Like you need to know how to use, you know, fill in the blank software and be more savvy with technology. Now the analog manual things are starting to seem more important. And when you talk about career opportunities, there's a very dried up pipeline, for lack of a better phrase, in craftsmanship, in a lot of the hands-on design things like tailoring.

23:01Sheena Butler-Young: Do you see those becoming more important as AI becomes more widespread, the use of AI? So I'm not entirely sure it's related to AI, but I feel like, especially in our reporting at BUF, we've talked a lot about the power of craftsmanship and how what makes you different on the market is really showing that you are investing in human savoir-faire and making sure that you are salvaging and being nearly a museum curator of art. and I think Chanel does that really well with Metier d 'Art and we are seeing other luxury brands do that extremely well. Loewe, for instance, with all of their exhibitions across the world on the art of crafts and even Louis Vuitton, if you look at their latest store in Shanghai, which looks like a giant boat, when you go in, you can have a look at the history of the Louis Vuitton artifacts and how the artisans work on them and then you can go have a coffee and be really immersed in all of that craftsmanship.

24:07So we know the luxury industry has its eye on, okay, how do we prove that everything that we do is high quality because it's made by humans? However, when it comes to these early career jobs, there is a problem at the moment, which is the people who have all the knowledge of the craftsmanship need to give it or need to teach it to the younger generations. but it's not that easy. And I always remembered an early documentary from Loic Prigent, who is this amazing fashion documentary producer from the early 2000s. And he interviewed a lady who worked for Gabrielle Chanel and who was specializing in a specific know-how called galon, which is when you kind of like separate the fiber of a fabric and then twist it to create something new.

25:01And she was the only person who could do that for Chanel. And Chanel tried to send apprentices to this lady for her to teach them how to do it. And they never managed to do it as well as her. And she died a few years ago. And that art is now lost with her. So we really need to think about the transmission of know-how. And I don't think I've seen many companies really focus on that. We know that Louis Vuitton and Chanel and others have their own ateliers and they have apprentices. But that transmission, I think, is kind of like missing. And I don't really know how you go from studying fashion design in London to learning a unique know-how from 60 plus year old artisans from Chanel.

25:50Sheena Butler-Young: That is so fascinating. Most of the conversations that I've had have put that transmission that you described or the lack thereof on the early career people. They've said that they don't desire those skills, that they prefer what they see as the buzzier, more exciting roles. Like, how can I be creative director of Hermes by next week versus, you know, maybe digging in their heels a little bit and learning some of these hands on skills? which brings me to, I think it's a nice segue. We won't debate whether the youth today are actually embracing that part of the industry. But I think a lot of feedback from top executives or HR leaders to schools has, there's some consistent themes, which is that at times there is a disconnect between the skills that early career professionals have and their career ambitions or what the industry actually looks like.

26:54Sheena Butler-Young: From where you sit, what's the biggest gap between what graduates think they're bringing to the table and what companies actually want? I think the disconnect is really on what a job in fashion was to us 10 years ago and what a job in fashion is to Gen Z now in 2026, post-COVID. I feel like many of us millennials really thought about our careers as our identity. And it's who we are. And it's such a huge part of our life. Whereas for many of the Gen Z students I have spoken with, yes, they want a good career, but they don't want it to be their entire life. And when we did that BOF careers survey, we did receive some answers from students, nearly 250 of them.

27:44And some of the themes that came up many times were work-life balance, the end of unpaid internships, the end of nepotism. And so it really shows that they want to change the industry inside out. And really, they are bringing these new ideas, which I love. And I'm so happy that they are, especially given how we were introduced to working in the fashion industry and in journalism. And we were told you need to work seven days a week and read everything and never stop. They see it differently. And there is a huge disconnect because if your line manager is in the 40s or 50s and they were told that this job is about being connected seven days a week and being on Slack and Teams and being available seven days a week, there is a tough reaction when they have someone who is younger and who is just saying, if it's 5.30 and you are paying me to work between nine and five uh this is it i'm going home and you can't message me or and you don't even have my personal number anyway so um so you can't do that to me yeah no i mean it's i think

28:51Sheena Butler-Young: that is a process and a struggle that's probably going to take pushing and pulling on all sides to probably find the middle i won't get too far into my personal opinions on it but i do i think that I think the biggest challenge from the inside of people that are in middle management and maybe above is where it gets misguided, expecting hard work from early career professionals is in defaulting to I want you to have it just as hard as I had it hard with no rhyme or reason. And I think if my peers can get past that, I think we get closer to the middle. if you were choosing a fashion school today and let's pretend for a moment Dan that you were going into you know design or one of the full range of careers that are available in fashion which I think also includes a little bit of what we do the the comms and journalism side of it what is one question that you would ask that you don't think prospective students ask today and this is this could be a question of you know the the president or dean of a college the admissions committee or even the industry?

29:53Sheena Butler-Young: Like what's a question that prospective students need to be asking? Oh, I think I would be looking for a degree that includes some kind of compulsory lessons on the global south. I think I would be really wondering, okay, if this is a Parisian school or a London school or a Milan-based school, do you have any classes on consumer behavior in the global south and fashion design that is global so i don't want just to learn how chanel and dior did haute couture i also want to learn about modest fashion and creating garments for climate change and how to use ai on fashion design softwares for kids and older people because in some countries we are getting really really old and we are going to live past 120 so I would probably ask these questions are you preparing me for the future and are you aware that at the moment if we look at GDP growth it's much higher in the global south than it is in the US or in Europe that's awesome I would have never thought of that I was thinking you like interdisciplinary skills commercial acumen that's a really fascinating a fascinating question and I I think our listeners will find that very helpful as they interrogate the fashion education system.

31:19Sheena Butler-Young: Dan, this was lovely. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. My first time on the debrief. Thank you so much. It was so much fun. I'm so glad we got to do this. Please be sure to check out our reporting on fashion careers at businessoffashion.com. These and other stories are available to BOF professional subscribers only, and you can find the links in the episode notes. You've been listening to The Debrief. Produced and edited by Olivia Davies and Angel Nemov. I'm Sheena Butler-Young. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Thanks so much for joining us, and be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

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