The digital design program at Vancouver Film School was one year, six terms, and I was handed all six. On the first day of every intake I said the same thing to the whole cohort.
School is a game. In some places grades matter. Here, your portfolio matters. We are going to give you the tools and the training to author your own careers.
You need 64.5% to pass this program. Make sure you do.
That is not a lowered standard. It is a relocated one. Everything above the floor was theirs to spend wherever it compounded. A student at 64.5% with a great portfolio and a job was a better outcome than one at 90% with every assignment done and nothing to show.
Fail here, where it is free. Not out there, where it costs a job.
Then the year was built so each term could count on the last.
Term one was exposure. As many things as we could put in front of them, and the term where we read how each of them thought: an ethnographic brief to go out, watch people and design a better play space or product, and small interface projects that told us whether a student designed in layers or took everything literally.
Term two was the heaviest, on purpose. Nine courses. Full marks in all nine was not possible, which was the point. After a term of being shown everything, they had to choose, and the choosing was the lesson.
Term three was a client. Real nonprofits, around fifty over the years: a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a cancer ride, a provincial health campaign about antibiotics that ran on the side of buses. School projects tend to serve the student. Design in the world serves someone else, and a nonprofit with a real brief is the safest place to learn it.
Source: the program 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, and I wanted the trade-off happening to them while we taught it.
Then the check-in. Grades so far, portfolio so far, and the conversation about the second half of the year. The pivot.
Terms four and five were theirs. Students wrote the criteria their graduate project would be judged against, and our job was to raise the bar on what they chose to make. They could change scope at the midpoint, as a conversation, with a reason. What they could not do was quietly stop doing the thing they had committed to.
They pitched their graduate projects to people from industry, and I matched mentors to projects by asking who cared about which idea. Sometimes I said no: a project nobody fitted, or a mentor without the technical depth that project needed. The mentors were working practitioners, and often the people who might hire the student afterwards.
From the middle of term four to the middle of term six, the graduate project, and inside it the mentor meetings, spaced out on purpose. Too many, too close together, and there was no room for a student to be lost for a week and find their own way out.
Ninety minutes for the whole class. Then food, drink and the conversations.
We invited everyone we knew and filled the auditorium: up to a hundred people from industry, the mentors among them, faculty from other programs with their own networks, and mostly people who hire. Our promise to them was that we would not take their whole evening. A class of twenty to twenty-five presented in ninety minutes or less. Then catered food, and a laptop at every student's station to walk people through the work.
Everyone was surprised by how much a student could say in three minutes. That is why we called it Appetizers. The pitch from term three, the mentors from terms four and five, and the portfolio from all six met in that room.
In term six we also taught what a design school usually does not: how to pitch a portfolio, how to negotiate, business law and ethics.
Tell a class the pass mark is 64.5% and some will aim for exactly that. I knew it when I said it, and I said it anyway.
That is the real cost and it is not the only one. The school backed it, even when it made people nervous.
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.
Not so they could get hired. So they would be in demand, and could choose who they worked for.