21 Jun 2007 1056H

D-School: Innovation Institutionalized or Higher Education Scam?

Occasionally I wonder about going back to school. No longer for the PhD, my MA was long and expensive enough, but, of course, when you’re young, you tend not to think about these things, because life is long and youth is forever. The latest of these inquiries revolves around another master’s, this time in interaction design, maybe from CMU, or one of these new fangled programs in Design.

I was reading this article in BusinessWeek about D-School. That’s design school. Not for visual communications.

Much of what I do doesn’t really involve new product development, which seems to be the focus of the article, but those seem to be the really juicy gigs with lots of time and investment. I also look at a lot of resumes and it seems like the schools are trying to churn out people who are really focused on NPD even if there aren’t those kinds of openings in industry.

I tend to think that universities and colleges, large established ones, junior colleges, and the more recent for-profits, pick up on these notions and make money out of them. They’re expensive programs and although I’ve worked in this field — for what, 11 years now? — I wonder actually how much more I know now than the people actually teaching in these programs, and how much time I’ll actually be helping them doing research or teaching undergrads basic web wonkery. Given the amount of time I’ve spent in field it now seems prohibitively expensive and frankly a waste of time just for the sheepskin.

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