The Art Institutes’ decline At proud Michigan trade school, a sense of confusion and betrayal
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
NOVI, Mich. — An arts school may have seemed out of place housed in a corporate office park in this Detroit suburb famed for a 1940s race car engine and now experiencing a boom in energy, information technology and automotive firms.
Yet since opening in 2008, the Art Institute of Michigan served as a hub of creative skills that often overlapped with technology in the Motor City.
The Novi school garnered a surge of interest from nontraditional college students from Michigan’s suburbs and small towns who couldn’t afford the tuition or the commute to other art schools. “The name was so big to me — the Art Institute,” said Daniel Sav, a Romanian immigrant whose son, Christopher, is a year into the animation program at the school.
The father and son, who live in nearby Livonia, were on a Fourth of July camping trip earlier this summer when they received an email from owner Dream Center Education Holdings that the campus would shutter by the end of the year.
“It’s upsetting,” Christopher Sav said, his voice rising with indignation. “I just don’t know what else to say, you know? It came out of the blue. It seemed like they were doing fine. It hit harder than bricks.”
The school’s abrupt closure announcement has left hundreds of others feeling the same way.
A mixture of shock, betrayal and confusion has roiled the student body and recent graduates who had been optimistic — despite past management struggles under the school’s previous owner, Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corp. — that the institute was destined for a bright future under the new ownership.
The loss of the Michigan campus shows what the dramatic withering of the Art Institute college chain means for a proud, century-old brand of trade education nationwide.
While the Art Institute of Pittsburgh remains open in the Strip District, Dream Center Education Holdings announced 18 campuses across the country are closing their doors — shuttering schools that promised the prestige of an art school with the practical skills of a trade school meant to propel people into good-paying, middle class jobs.
By the end of the year, there will be just a dozen Art Institutes open — about a quarter of the
schools just three years ago.
Learning the craft
The Art Institute of Michigan opened its doors in 2008 just as the Great Recession began to hit American cities like Detroit, beckoning people with degree programs in creative arts fields like animation, graphic design, culinary, audio engineering, fashion and photography.
The school filled a twostory brick building in a spacious office park just off an exit ramp from one of metro Detroit’s many busy highways.
Its sleek lobby featured a glass showcase and high walls to display student work. It had classrooms with technology used today in arts fields, giving an animation student, for example, access to a room full of $2,000 computer monitors that bring life to 3-D designs. Any equipment too expensive for students to buy, they could rent from a check-out room called the Cage.
A student lounge was painted with a red-and-black Art Institute color scheme and outfitted with soft couches. A full kitchen classroom and a restaurant open to the public offered with a menu of food prepared — and served — by culinary students.
Jon Kopacz, a photography professor, said the school swelled with students during the financial crisis as factories shut down in metro Detroit. He sat among them, earning a bachelor’s degree in photography in 2012 and becoming an instructor shortly thereafter.
“The concept that one should learn art for the prestigious reasons of simply being an artiste — that’s all well and good for someone who does not need to financially support themselves,” Mr. Kopacz said.
Compared to other art schools, he said, the Art Institute is unique “in that we not only teach the craft — how to design a website, how to animate a character, how to bake a loaf a bread — but we also teach them how to take the craft and make a living out of it.”
That was the vision of EDMC, a for-profit education company, when it began buying Art Institute campuses nearly 50 years ago and turned the concept into a chain.
After EDMC purchased the Art Institute of Pittsburgh -— which had been founded in Pittsburgh in 1921 — the brand grew to dozens of locations across the country. At its peak, it enrolled 100,000 students at 60 campuses nationwide.
‘It was the prestige’
In Novi, where the population is growing and corporate headquarters and research facilities jostle for space, the school held a prominent spot — and was often a selling point, said Alan Weber, the city’s economic development director.
He frequently took international business clients who were interested in opening offices in Novi to lunch at the school’s restaurant, the Great Lakes Bistro.
“That was a huge asset for showing off the talent we have, the education of our citizens to better themselves and the whole gamut of an entrepreneurial-type atmosphere,” Mr. Weber said. “We got a lot of students outside of metro Detroit looking at that opportunity that don’t necessarily have to go to downtown Detroit or a traditional art school.”
And Mr. Weber suspects the school played a role, along with other factors, in Novi’s unemployment dropping from a 8.5 percent in December 2009 and to an astonishingly low 2 percent this year.
Around the time EDMC was celebrating a second Art Institute of Michigan campus in Troy, Mich., in 2011, troubles began to arrive in the form of a whistleblower investigation taken up by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Enrollment began to fall as EDMC and other forprofit schools struggled with allegations of illegally recruiting students and failing to prepare them for jobs.
From 2011 to 2014, EDMC reported losing more than $2 billion. In 2015, the company announced it would shut down 15 Art Institutes, including the Troy campus that had about 300 students at the time.
“It was the prestige” of the Art Institutes that drew Katilynn Moss to the Art Institute of Michigan’s Troy campus in 2013.
Plus, that campus was just a 40-minute drive south from her home in Capac, Mich., a town of 1,600 people. When the Troy campus closed, the Novi campus was about double the commute time but she figured it was still worth transferringto Novi.
“When you apply for jobs, you’ll be one of the top people,” she remembers thinking.
A shocking announcement
Students described the Michigan campus in Novi as insulated from all the corporate issues playing out in Pittsburgh.
“We were drastically improving, by the day,” said C.J. Maier, an animation student at the Art Institute of Michigan who works in the equipment-rental room. Tasked with printing out badges for new students, he’s recently made about 80 badges a quarter, up from 20 to 40 badges a quarter in previous years.
EDMC’s sale to Dream Center Education Holdings, announced last year, was supposed to mean a new chapter. The Californiabased nonprofit that bought the operation pledged to turn the schools around.
Then came the announcement July 2 that 18 Art Institute campuses would close by the end of this year. Dream Center’s notice filed in June with the Michigan’s labor department showed 116 employees at Novi, including 68 faculty members, got layoff notices.
The organization gave the students an option of half-off tuition if they move to another Art Institute or if they finish their degree online.
In an extra wrinkle, students discovered the Novi school had lost accreditation in January, worrying recent graduates that their degrees were worthless.
Students from across the country flocked to a Facebook page called “I Am AI,” which has nearly 7,500 members, to share personal stories and criticize the handling of the closures.
“Because of all this, I’m kind of confused,” said Mr. Maier. He said there has been disinformation coming from all sides and little clear instruction from the Michigan school, which he believes was caught flat-footed.
“I know I can’t move” to finish my degree, he said, looking to his friend, Sara Budzynowski, an animation student who, with one course left to graduate, was weighing relocation.
She wanted to finish the last course online, but the online division is housed within the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, which is on probation and facing questions from Philadelphia-based Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
Her mother suggested she go to Florida for a few months, since the Art Institute of Tampa has stable accreditation.
“I paid for it; I want it,” said Ms. Budzynowski, who had previously studied veterinary science and decided she wanted to follow her passion for art instead.
She lamented the loss of the Novi school, speaking of close relationships with professors.
“That’s why I came here,” she said. “I can talk to teachers who have actually been in the industry and know the ins and outs of these programs. I can get hands-on learning from a professional on the campus and utilize their equipment, as opposed to, like, trying to find some random Youtube tutorials.”
Still some optimism
On a walk through the school on a weekday in July, it was clear lessons continued in some classrooms. The kitchen was bustling with clanging pots and pans.
But bulletin boards that used to display student work were mostly empty, save for a flier advertising the I Am AI Facebook page, urging that students “not trust the schools to work in your best interest.”
A lone attendant manned the school store, where the Ai-branded T-shirts are mocked by students, the final shipment of art supplies had arrived and the coffee machine was turned off.
In the deserted student lounge, a placard in the corner advertised job openings at an OfficeMax store in Farmington Hills.
Despite the grim mood, there’s some evidence that graduates can be optimistic.
Ms. Moss, who graduated from the Novi campus with a graphic design degree in October 2017, said she got a job after about four months of looking. She works designing boxes and promotional materials for Pro-4 Tactical, a distributor of flashlights, knives and other tools in Southfield, Mich.
Another graphic design graduate, Jessie Earnest, snatched up a job within weeks of graduating in June. She now spends her days between a computer and a manufacturing floor, helping produce custom products like prints, posters, coasters, laser-cut designs — pretty much anything that can be put into a digital file.
“To work here and be happy, you have to be able to multi-task and be able to roll with the punches,” said Terry Gilbert, founder and owner of Second Story Interiors in Ferndale, Mich., as Ms. Earnest checked on a laser-cut logo.
“I know what hard work and hustle and having a lot of heart can do, and that’s one of the main things I look at in somebody,” Mr. Gilbert said.
“Whether her degree is accredited or not, that’s not going to affect the way we treat her,” he added. “I think anybody should be given a chance.”