Advising for Transfer Students from Ohlone Community College
As you may have heard, Cal State East Bay is converting from Quarters to Semesters starting Fall 2018. In the Art Department, we are making significant changes with the creation of new concentrations, and a differentiation of our Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees.
We chose to make big, exciting changes for three reasons:
First is the need to keep up with student demands and offer new concentrations. A concentration is what most of you casually refer to as a major. You may say, “I am majoring in Photography”, but technically you are majoring in Art with a concentration in Photography.
In response to student demand, we are ending our general Multimedia concentration and creating new concentrations in Video & Animation, in Interaction & Game Design, and in Illustration. The details of each concentration are listed on the linked Degree Roadmaps
Second is that conversations with alumni and with employers showed that hiring standards have increased in our fields – there are a lot of talented people who want to move to the Bay Area – and our students weren’t leaving with the skills they needed to compete for the good jobs. Our response has been to add more required skills-based courses to allow students to build up their portfolios. When you are looking for a job, you need the degree to get you past HR, but you need a strong portfolio to get hired. We have moved all these specific career-focused art and design concentrations into our BFA degree. It’s not an honors degree, but it is the degree that will give you the portfolio you need to get a good job or get into graduate school.
This is true of every concentration except Art History & Visual Studies. In the field of Art History, you don’t need a portfolio, so the BA is the top degree. With a BA and good grades in Art History you can get into graduate school or find a job at a museum, but for Art and Design Practice, you want to go for the BFA.
Third is that for our students, sometimes tough reality gets in the way. Someone loses a job, gets badly sick, gets pregnant, and the student just can’t hold it all together. We don’t want students to drop out without any degree to show for all their work, so we have redesigned our BA degree to have two simple options, one in Studio Arts and one in Design, that are faster to graduate than either the BFA or our old quarter-based BA. These don’t deliver the heavy hitting portfolio or the cutting-edge skillset, but they do mean that if you do need to get out soon, there is still a path that lets you say “I graduated from college. I got my BA.”
Fallback Bachelor’s Degrees
These don’t deliver the professional portfolio or the career-focused skills of the Professional Degrees above, but provide alternatives for students who need to get a degree faster and will work on their portfolio and job skills later.