Are photography courses useful?

Read this over at the British Journal of Photographer where as last week, their editor Simon Bainbridge published the following comment on photography education :

Personally, I've got no axe to grind about the thousands of young people studying photography each year, despite the fact they have virtually no prospect of making a living from it when they graduate. After all, for most students university is primarily an educational signpost; a piece of paper that says they've attained the same level of academic achievement as nearly 50% of other recent school leavers in the UK. So why not go study something you enjoy, and therefore might actually learn some transferable skills from in the process?

But most final year photography students I meet are hopelessly naive about their prospects, and the failure of colleges to spell out the facts is, at the very least, a moral failure. There are simply too many photographers - good ones, with real skills and experience, and with at least half-baked business models - to survive the current climate. So please, spare me another student telling me they plan to do a bit of art, a bit of editorial and - begrudgingly - a bit of advertising when they get out there and begin their God-given career.

Here's the verdict of a photographer who's the role model for students who think they can do a bit of everything in service of their own art. 'My advice? Get re-skilled,' says Simon Norfolk (writing for World Press Photo, not long after losing his savings to a collapsed Icelandic bank). 'Keep your photographic aspirations but try to get a trade like film editing, web-design or accounting. Soon we'll all be amateur photographers with real money-making jobs on the side that we don't tell our colleagues about. We need to get over the snobbery attached to that.'

Well you can probably guess the mail they got from that one statement . Read these over at the BJP's blog "1854"

My quick take on it depends really on the student. Some folks work better in a school than others and up to that person to figure it out. Some amazing photographers I know went to RIT, Art Center or Brooks and other amazing photographers were self-taught. Really depends on the person.