Having attended DigiPen's Game Design program, my perspective is informed by a few years of exposure to the curriculum and it's administrators. DigiPen is a private college, whose primary mission is to expand it's own operations; education is the ostensible mission of the business, but ultimately DigiPen does not offer an educational opportunity as much as it offers ambitious amateurs who have already trained themselves in the basics of the industry a chance to exercise their abilities under immense pressure to produce. The design curriculum is new, poorly organized, and nearly bereft of direct instruction; the vast majority of student effort is expended on project production. On the other hand, the Computer Science and Fine Arts programs, which were established years ago, have proven their educational value to students many times over. It is in the new design program that student attrition is nearly 95% since the program was implemented- primarily because of students becoming disillusioned with the slapdash organization of the curriculum. As evidence, I offer that each & every one of my design professors volunteered without prompting that they were unaware of what skills we'd been trained in prior to arriving in their course; there is no coordination between courses, and both students and professors are in the dark as to how the courses supplement and augment each other. More than once at the beginning of the semester, no professor had yet been secured to teach classes for which my cohort had already paid tuition; when professors were shipped over from the international campuses to fill the void, they regularly lacked a plan for conducting the course. Of utmost concern, the primary course in the game design curriculum is overseen by a professor who has asserted repeatedly that he can not teach game design- but that his role is to certify whether or not students meet professional standards for game design by the time the arrive in you class, at the start of the 2nd year. Exercise caution when enrolling
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