I am not against portfolio schools.
That needs to be said first. I do not think they are without value. If you hail from Miami Ad School or Denver Ad School or the Portfolio Center or whatever, I’m sincerely happy for you. I even personally had a cameo once in a class at Creative Circus (RIP), and it was fun for me and, I hope, useful for the students. Despite a rising number of college advertising programs, there aren’t nearly as many as there should be, and as a person who benefited greatly from studying in such a program, I’m glad aspiring creatives have an opportunity to fill in the gaps that weren’t covered in their other education. Some of My Best Friends Went to Portfolio School.
I recognize that my criticism of portfolio schools could be seen as sour grapes, since I did want to go to one after college and didn’t have the money for it. It took me a while to finally make my entree into the industry, and I had to write a lot of student recruitment postcards to finally build a decent book. But all that just made me glad there’s a resource for people to not have to, like, work for a law firm straight out of college and then amass a portfolio full of campus tour maps and college viewbooks as they try to launch a career.
Got it? We good?
I hope that was effusive enough praise to keep the portfolio school people from getting their backs up during the rest of this post.
The Rest of the Post
Blah blah great education blah blah great experience blah, but portfolio schools don’t just provide extra training and an opportunity to build a portfolio aspiring creatives might not be able to find elsewhere. They also provide an advantage in terms of prestige, brand recognition, and contacts that aren’t available to everyone. And yes, I know advantages simply aren’t going to be available to everyone — hell, I myself came out of college with an advantage over someone who didn’t have access to that kind of program. I’m not going to sit here whining about the abstract concept of advantages.
But I’ve taken part in conversations of late about whether portfolio school graduates should receive a salary advantage over creatives coming in without that additional training. The argument made to me was that once a person has invested that much in their advertising education, a higher starting salary is warranted. The natural tradeoff would be that the cost of that education would naturally be offset by more money from jump.
And I do get where they’re coming from. But… no.
A person’s salary isn’t supposed to be compensation for the cost of their education. It’s supposed to represent the value of their work. Now, exactly how that value is calculated is itself a matter for debate, but the idea — or maybe just the ideal — is that the money comes not because your education was expensive but because you’re good at your job. And giving an incoming creative a higher salary just because they had the resources to access that education in the first place leaves equally qualified creatives who didn’t have those resources at a disadvantage.
Qualified is qualified.
A thing to remember about hiring baby creatives is that at the most junior levels, agencies are hiring for potential as much as they are for an impressive book. No matter how much training a junior has coming into the role, the greatest part of it is going to be learning on the job, how to navigate a real-life agency environment, how to mesh with that agency’s culture and ways of working, that agency’s particular conception of what good and creative and effective mean. A good-looking portfolio is important, but so is openness and potential and willingness — hunger, even — to grow. Neither of those elements is something you can afford to sacrifice when you’re hiring juniors. And if you find a junior who has it all, their salary should reflect that, not the cost of the education that got them there.
Again, I get it. Portfolio school is expensive, y’all. But at the same time, portfolio school is expensive, y’all. It would be great if everyone had those kinds of financial resources, but they don’t. And we need to accept that other ways of gaining a comparable advertising education should be more plentiful, more accessible, and more respected by agencies as they’re hiring juniors. If agencies offer more internships, and make an effort to make those internships meaningful and substantive, aspiring creatives will have opportunities to learn about the industry and get some actual work in their book. If we, as industry professionals, put more emphasis on mentorship, aspiring creatives can gain some of the insights and guidance they’d otherwise get from portfolio school faculty.
And if agencies recognize the value of that kind of education, and make an effort to recognize creativity and skill and potential even without the slick production value that can come with a portfolio school’s resources, they’ll have a greater population of baby creatives to choose from when they’re hiring, and the quality of their output can improve because they’re able to get their hands on super-promising juniors they might not otherwise look at.
Product vs. process
As a past mentor to a number of baby copywriters, I’ve gotten to work with students hoping to make the most of their college advertising education and with aspiring creatives who got their start elsewise and want to learn how to Do Copywriter and break into the industry. And I love both of them. It’s fulfilling to me, and my mentees say they get a lot out of it, which they’d probably say anyway but I choose to take it at face value. But I get a special thrill out of helping that latter group gain experience and make contacts and build a book — and watching them enter the industry with just as much talent and potential as anyone else I’ve seen coming in as a junior, portfolio school or no.
I love portfolio schools, as a concept and as an institution. I wrote that whole long disclaimer at the beginning of the post. Don’t @ me. But they need to be a great educational experience and opportunity for baby creatives, not a gate key or power-up for those who can access them.
Put a portfolio-schooled and a homemade baby creative side by side, and chances are good the former will be a stronger candidate, because they’ll have spent dedicated time gaining the skills and experience that make them a stronger candidate. It would be silly to disregard a candidate who has the skill, talent, mindset, and promise just because of how those things were acquired. But put equally qualified portfolio-schooled and homemade juniors on the same team, and it would be silly to give one a salary boost just because of how those qualifications were acquired.
In the end, it comes down to democratizing advertising education and welcoming a wider diversity of educational approaches. And part of that comes down to making those opportunities available ourselves, with internships and mentorships and partnerships to offer guidance, provide experience, and nurture talent for promising creatives. There’s room for everyone at the table, and if not? We’re creative people. We can build a bigger table.