Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design — Attraction in Lakewood

Go anywhere else. I've been at RMCAD since 2023. Older transfer student coming in with an associate's degree in graphic design. They also didn't accept several classes as transfers that I ended up taking again. In the 2 years here I cannot say I've learned anything new except for the life drawing class which was due to the teacher. Photoshop teacher knew way less than I do, already taken a 16 week photoshop class that was way more in depth, it didn't transfer here for some reason but does elsewhere. Signed up for RMCAD on a whim just to get back into school. As an adult I am only able to do part time, so I had assumed it would take a bit longer to complete my bachelors, but after 2 years I only have a few credits that will transfer and was looking at 3.5 more years at RMCAD because I wasted so much time on foundations that don't transfer.

100% acceptance rate, critiques are extremely unbalanced and way too nice to be constructive. I could never be honest. When the piece you've spent hours on is being compared to a really bad sketch of a looney toons character there is no point. Imagine going to a music school and not knowing how to play the instrument. That's what's happening here.

Game art seems to be the most put together but also gets the most resources and connections offered. Had people from major animation studios come and the kids do not take the opportunity to network, they don't know how. I am studying to move on to a masters in art therapy and have struggled to get the right classes. I have had no opportunities to connect with anyone relevant. I'm not happy with the quality of the curriculum, you can't make connections or really learn much in 8 weeks.

I have also had serious issues getting a work study, emailing multiple times, getting offered positions that end up being closed. Worked for tech bar and it was a nightmare. There is no delegation so only a few of us did the work while others literally left to draw and have going away parties. Got stuck working the late shift until 10pm while no one is there, got to encounter a security guy who got fired for touching someone inappropriately and was spying on all the women using the security cameras. Also continue to hire kids who just graduated with no experience for jobs they have no prior training for.

Teachers leave en masse to work elsewhere. Front Range got quite a few good ones if you're looking for alternatives. Within a few terms all my friends had dropped out or transferred to MSU. Took the summer off due to burn out, you have to withdraw then re-enter... When I got back, I was informed the Dean got kicked out, never really got resolution on that and don't even know if we currently have a Dean.

This is a for-profit private school, you can go to any other school for the same or cheaper, have normal length classes and not have your FAFSA money messed with. Staff is immature.

Out of the 20 or so I've had only 3 seemed like college level classes/professors and none were full time. 'Campus life' may be different if you're younger, but I ended up online.

I wasted at least a year on classes that literally no one cares about, it is owned by Full Sail and they try to hide that, and now that I'm completely done wasting my time barely any of my credits transfer. I also didn't make any work worthy of a portfolio, but walked away from my previous school, which was a community college, with 2 full, very professional portfolios that helped me get jobs promptly. That school also required internships which RMCAD needs to do for all programs, not just interior design. These kids are being thrown out into the world thinking they can make it as freelance artists with no real technical, business or networking skills or even just experience. The skills I have seen were natural, not cultivated at RMCAD.

Even the withdrawal process has been more complicated than it needs to be. Asked about withdrawal and got paperwork immediately instead of giving me options, and even the paperwork was ambiguous. Just go to a normal school, none of this is work...

Where to begin? RMCAD has the potential to be a great post-secondary art education institution - they have a beautiful intimate campus, and a great student-to-teacher ratio for in-person classes, and yet, they still fall short in so many ways.

Post-COVID, on-campus enrollment plummeted—over 80% of students didn’t return to in-person classes, leaving roughly 150 students now on campus each term. This caused major issues, including a lack of available in-person classes required for your major, and frequent professor reassignments. Instructors often don’t know what they’re teaching until one or two weeks before a term starts, leading to severe underpreparedness and a poor learning experience.

Faculty professionalism is another major issue. While a few professors genuinely care about their students and try to do a good job, most fall short. So far, I would say only 30% of the professors I've had have been average / good, while the other 70% have been underprepared, unqualified to teach, and quite frankly don't seem like they even want to be here.

The education quality is often worse than public high school and incomparable to my previous college experience. One professor didn’t bother to grade assignments for the last four weeks of class, ignored feedback requests from her students, and openly talked about her desire to leave RMCAD. Instead of teaching, she spent most of our class time shopping online and watching TV shows—yet she remains employed despite official documented student complaints. What does that tell you about the quality of education here and the school's priorities?

Some of the course curriculum being taught raises eyebrows too; there are many mistakes, out-of-order learning units, and outdated information in the LMS (learning management system), which each class is supposed to follow, whether you are an on-ground or online student. If you take classes online, not having direct access to your professor necessitates a lot of back-and-forth communication and easily creates confusion, whenever there are blatant mistakes in the learning module you are supposed to be following, since online classes do not have professors that lecture.

RMCAD also struggles with student retention due to institutional ineffectiveness and poor communication. A major frustration is the inability to schedule your own classes, an unusual policy for higher education. While students can submit scheduling preferences, these are ignored 90% of the time. The registrar’s office frequently assigns students to classes that don’t fit their availability, even when better options exist. This makes maintaining a job or arranging childcare extremely difficult. Every term, I’ve had to fight for schedule corrections, despite clear solutions being available from the start - they just always get overlooked by the people in charge of making your schedule.

If you try to be proactive, efforts to resolve issues are met with endless runarounds and finger-pointing between departments. Promised follow-ups rarely happen, requiring students to chase answers repeatedly. Younger, first-time college students would likely find this process even more frustrating. Despite being paying customers, students must constantly advocate for themselves to receive basic services.

Despite being a student at RMCAD for less than a year, these are not the only alarming issues I've encountered here - I could go on but am limited by Google's review character count maximum.

The root issue is that students are not RMCAD’s priority. Instead, financial interests seem to dominate decision-making, which makes sense given it’s a for-profit institution. Unfortunately, leadership seems unaware that taking care of students would, in turn, improve the school’s financial health. The campus's main owners and the college's president all lack backgrounds in education, and this disconnect reverberates throughout the institution. As a result, students receive a poor experience and low-quality education, making RMCAD an...

it's a shame the founder sold the school to investors who are completely disinterested in the voice of the student body (which is a fraction of the size it was a few semesters back... it's a ghost campus now). they'll do everything they can to sell the place to potential students and suck in new recruits but once you're there they don't care about what you have to say on matters such as how the required online liberal arts classes are an absolute joke being run on three different and extremely poorly designed websites, how the school is going through one of its recurring administrative changes in which they get rid of the student advisors without telling you and then find some people for the last two weeks of the semester, or how they overwork their teachers by making all of them the chair of at least one department and demanding they work terms back to back while teaching not only on ground classes but online classes as well on top of managing the departments they've been assigned. basically this school is a joke now and it's definitely not worth the money, which is unfortunate because there are so many brilliant and talented teachers there that genuinely just want to teach art but in the end the fun of learning and making art with knowledgeable professors just isn't worth the hassle of dealing with the "administration" and the politics of a transition from a prestigious art school to an outrageously overpriced vocational blanket education. it's so frustrating to experience inspiration and getting into a creative zone and then being rushed through it because we have to cover the next topic or skip the rest of this so we can make sure to complete the important assignments that get graded by the administration and not the teachers because you're not being graded on how much you've grown or learned but by how many key points have you included in this drawing to show that you've understood the course (perspective, proportions, lighting, color, etc). the way the administration manages to break down the art classes they offer into some spreadsheet of topics and chapters that must be covered in order for them to maintain their accreditation sucks all the fun out of studying art. it wouldn't be so bad to make sure we cover and understand key topics to meet accreditation requirements if we were given more time to cover all the material without rushing through it in 8 or 16 week terms without any breaks or leniency. if you can afford to piss away tens of thousands of dollars, it might not be a bad deal to complete a degree here... but for those who are taking out sizable student loans and/or working multiple jobs to try and cover the tuition cost, it's not worth the education...