Am I receiving "good" higher education for graphic design? my name is Asfand and I'm currently in my Junior year at a university in Lahore, Pakistan, studying Graphic Design.
However, I'm not sure if I'm receiving a quality education or not.
All the classes senior to me seem to have a general discontent with the quality of the education, and they all openly admit that university didn't teach them much. We spend 90% of our time just doing assignments (for example, &quot;create a national design policy for your country&quot;, &quot;create a piece of design using humour&quot;, &quot;create an art piece that represents 'you' [based on surveys that you will design and conduct]&quot;)
So we do most of our learning through doing, troubleshooting, and taking online tutorials while in the process of creating our assignments.
There is not as much (if any) basic education as to the etiquettes of design, what makes good design, etc etc (other than some basic knowledge we got in our freshman year). They don't really show us the ropes much or &quot;teach&quot; us, as much as we just learn what we do by making stuff along the way.
My question is, am I asking for too much? Yes we slack off and don't do as much research as we should before delving into our designs/artworks, but should it not be the institutions responsibility to an extent to point you in the right direction and show you the right/wrong, how to actually DO good design, before leaving it up to us to create art? I understand that they may not want to creatively stifle us by putting certain notions into our heads, but at the same time, this feels like very little/no effort is put into it, and we leave with 4 years worth of work experience from assignments, but not a lot of design education
Spend some time exploring Active Learning(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning). It sounds a lot like this is what you are seeing. Whether it is good or bad might depend a lot on how much feedback you get from what you do. But doing is a good thing.
If the focus of the program is on creativity, not technology, then this might be a great program. I think that for someone to become a poet they need to spend a lot of time writing poetry, not listening to lectures about it.
But you might want to explore the philosophy behind your program with some trusted faculty member. You might also want to look at the sort of positions that graduates of you program wind up with.
A friend of mine once led an education program that was focused around &quot;studio learning&quot; in which the students did almost nothing be work on projects - from real clients. The faculty was there to guide. It was incredibly innovative.