Recently, The Art Institute has been offering The Art Grant. They are willing to give you up to $18,600 off of your tuition! Whoa!!!
Here’s the scary side of it – it isn’t hard to get. Here are some facts about The Art Grant:
1. Student must maintain at least 12 credit hours per quarter.
2. Those 12 credit hours must be consecutive from quarter to quarter.
3. It is not retroactive.
4. Only available in The Art Institutes in California and the AI’s of Portland, Seattle, and Vegas.
5. Student must maintain “Satisfactory Academic Progress.”
6. Tuition can be reduced up to 20%, with a max of $18,600.
7. For new students, the first half of their education is reduced by 15% and the last half is reduced by 25%. This averages to 20%.
8. There is no GPA requirement.
The hardest part about The Art Grant would be to be able to stay in school for 12 credit hours per quarter consistently. I address this concern in the Three Year Graduation post as scheduling is the hardest part of The Art Institute of Las Vegas (not sure how it is at other AI’s).
I had to look up what “Satisfactory Academic Progress” meant to The Art Institutes. Here is the document that addresses it which took effect April 1st, 2012. On October 6th, 2014, I found a revision. However, the language in the paragraph below remains the same, and the overall layout of the document is redone.
The document states, “Completing courses with C or better grades indicates academic progress. Receiving D or lower grades and/or withdrawing from classes my put students at risk. Poor academic performance may lead to Academic/Financial Warning and/or Academic/Financial Aid Dismissal.” This means that as long as you maintain a C average, you can save up to 20% off of the tuition. Heck, they even let you have a D every once in a while from the looks of it.
If you scroll down to page 18 of the document, you can see a whole list of circumstances that will even waive you from not being considered Satisfactory Academic Progress! (It’s page 7 on the updated document)
There is also a lawsuit that seems to tie The Art Grant to some financial issues the Education Management Corporation, the owner of The Art Institutes, is having. You can see my blog post here for more information.
What does all of that mean? The Art Grant doesn’t promote a great education. It promotes doing just enough to get by. Getting a C in a class isn’t too hard. All you need to do is show up for the entire class period and turn in some half-assed work (at least before I started doing this blog). You can look at my Exams post to see how hard the exams were for me.
Receiving 20% off your tuition should demand great work. In the grand scheme of things, $18,600 is a lot of money (I know it doesn’t seem like it when pressed up against $90,000). That is an amount of money that should require some honest effort and perhaps at least a 3.5 GPA.
The school’s degrees would mean more if students weren’t essentially just buying them.
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