Please help make educated decision: Pratt vs Cincinnati

My son has been accepted to several ID schools and now he has narrowed down to the final two.: Pratt vs Cincinnati. We went on a tour at Cincinnati DAAP and were impressed with the program. However my son felt that the students did not look happy there. My son is leaning towards Pratt because it is in New York and has a good reputation. We live in San Francisco so he is used to the city lifestyle. We have not toured Pratt and now it may be too late to tour before the deadline. I have heard a lot of good things about DAAP but I am not able to find any recent comments on Pratt. Most of them are pretty dated except for ranking from DI.

Can someone tell me about the quality of work coming out from Pratt graduates?

Any Pratt recent graduates or students out there?

  1. Can you tell me if the faculty members provide great help and constructive critiques on your portfolio?
  2. I’ve read that the teachers are good there but the administration is not (again old posts so not sure if this is the case now).
  3. Is it easy to get summer internships?
  4. % of grads getting jobs right away and % grads stay in ID field
  5. Is it true Pratt has 80% female to 20% male ratio? How is ID?

Personally I would like him to stay in an university setting just in case he changes his mind but I think my son is pretty sure that’s what he wants. He did an internship at a design firm during summer and he loved every aspect that came with the job.

Any input is valuable information. You can take tuition cost out of the equation. They end up about the same with scholarship.Thank you!

I graduated from Pratt in 2005 with a bachelor degree in ID. My input may be a bit dated so take it with a grain of salt and DM me if you have additional questions.

  1. They had at least two official Portfolio Day events where professors would invite alumni/professionals to review your work on 1:1. Also there was a mandatory Portfolio Studio required for all graduating students during our senior year.
  2. I would agree with that statement, based on my first hand experiences. Most admins were Brooklyn locals and were brutally honest with you when it came to handling your paperwork, payments, etc. They weren’t at all unreasonable or unorganized though; it was just a matter of having thick skin and making sure they processed your papers, getting a receipt to validate your payments… I will say that they really put responsibility on your end to do lot of the leg work when you need to get things done. They won’t pampered you and call to make sure you turned in your work-study application on time, or if you had turned in that tuition check to avoid penalty fee.
  3. There were no requirements to attain summer internship in order to graduate and student counselors play a very little role to assist you with one. Probably the biggest drawback to Pratt’s program.
  4. I think roughly 30~40% attained a full-time ID job within a year or so. But this was spring of 2009, when the economy was at its worst.
  5. The ratio for ID dept, at least while I attended Pratt, was about 40% female, 60% male.

Hi Leewumonica,

Welcome to the boards. Both schools are great and put out great grads. Generally speaking, I do think they put out a very different type of student.

A good way for you and your son to gauge would be to go to http://www.behance.net and in the search criteria put “Industrial Design” in the Creative field and Pratt or University of Cincinnati in the school criteria. Most of the work on Behance is from students or recent-ish grads

This is the search results for Pratt

This is the search results for DAAP

If you want to take it to the next level, lots of people will list in their portfolio where they are currently employed which might help your son get a sense of what companies grads from each school tend to end up in.

What time of the semester did he visit? There’s definitely more intense times during the semester were almost everyone looks like they were going to loose it :laughing: DAAP is not perfect and like every school it has it’s issues. But it’s a world class ID program that does a great job preparing students to enter the workforce, so the work load and expectations are high and it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.