Car Design Schools Get Creative as Applications Drop Nationwide

• A shortage of college applicants has some colleges and universities reaching out to daw in more students.

• Schools have a presence at local Concours and car shows.

• Look for more clever ways to draw students in the future.

There is an overall decline in undergraduate college enrollment across America. It’s down by 9.4 percent compared to this same time two years ago, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. So some departments are getting creative about recruiting new students, particularly in transportation design, those that teach the kids who will be creating the car you drive five or 10 years from now.

“I would say that a lot of that (decline) is related to the pandemic,” said Yvette Sobky Shaffer, vice president of enrollment management and marketing at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where transportation design is offered as part of an industrial design major. “And there’s a huge decline in certain populations, specifically, a huge decline in men applying to college. So these are all related, students are applying to fewer colleges than they were. It peaked at around 10 colleges. Now the average is around six colleges. So when you aggregate all that to the same human being, there are fewer students applying to college now than 10 years ago.”

Dan Cuffaro, chair of industrial design design at CIA, blames the drop in transportation design students on the lack of inspiring figures that might get kids interested in drawing cars.

“This is not just a design thing,” Cuffaro said. “But when things that are popular in media, or a movie or television program or a social media star highlights something, these surges in certain areas, suddenly there’s an increase in awareness and it intrigues someone. Right now there’s no Knight Rider, there's no Dukes of Hazzard... Cars (the movie) was almost 15 years ago, these moments in popular culture where car culture is at the forefront, those are the moments where the interest of young people is piqued.”

Other institutions are faring better.

“The Academy has increased its recruitment efforts across the board, and it is paying off,” said Kate Ross, spokesperson for Academy of Art University San Francisco. “Transportation design is as popular as it always has been.”

Last weekend the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena held a new event called the ArtCenter Design Invitational. The Pasadena, California, institution invited select alumni, industry partners, and car collectors to “exhibit their vehicles and reveal stories behind the design with current and prospective students to help inspire the next generation of designers,” the school said in announcing the event.

The Design Invitational replaced, for this year, anyway, a much larger and fully public gathering called the ArtCenter Car Classic, which was one of the more popular car-centric events in the state, a must-see Concours on the annual cool car events calendar. Last Sunday’s Design Invitational saw famous ArtCenter alums like Tesla’s Franz von Holzhausen showing off the coming Cybertruck and discussing its creation with high school and community college students from Southern California schools. The problem at ArtCenter is not getting enough applicants, it’s balancing the diversity of applicants to better reflect the population. So many of the applicants are from Pacific Rim countries. The idea with the Design Invitational was to draw in more local students from all backgrounds.

To get word out about transportation design as a major, ArtCenter has a presence at Concours like The Quail a Motorsports Gathering and Pebble Beach, as well as at events like the L.A. Auto Show. There is a part of the Petersen Automotive Museum that has real, live ArtCenter students designing cars.

The CIA has pursued similar extracurricular activities aimed at, among other goals, recruiting new students.

“We’ve done those events at the Glenmoor Gathering, which is one Concours around here,” said Cuffaro. “We’ve worked with the Crawford Auto and Aviation Museum, which is in our neighborhood, the same neighborhood as the college where we will help them create exhibitions. They recently had an exhibition about alternative power in vehicles. So not only did students provide work, but we worked with our alumni on them.”

Between them all, design schools should be able to keep up with demand, producing all manner of young, eager design talents.