Fashion Majors Say They Need More Business Training.

In the BoF global fashion education survey, many fashion students and alumni believe that their business education is very weak.

London, England, in the past twenty years, fashion has developed into a huge industry and has expanded to every corner of the globe. According to Euromonitor data, the global clothing and footwear market in 2014 reached a total value of US $1 trillion and 700 billion (about 10 trillion and 860 billion yuan), and it is expected to grow to $2.2 trillion in 2019 (about 14 trillion and 60 billion yuan). Collectivize integrated ventures and venture capitalists have changed the way of Fashion Management and influenced their growth path by combining creativity and commerce more closely. Fashion houses such as Burberry and Saint Laurent have also evolved into "creative directors", which means they are managers of a team, spokesmen for brands, directors of advertisements, and skilled hands who can draw and make plates.

Even so, data from the BoF global fashion education survey show that fashion education institutions are not successful in business education. Of the 4032 undergraduate and graduate students and alumni, only 58% of them were satisfied or very satisfied with their commercial education. This is one of the 24 key indicators surveyed, with the lowest satisfaction level among students.

Of those surveyed, 42% studied fashion design or work in this field. Other groups will introduce those designs to the market, including through commodity procurement, e-commerce, IT technology, retail management, finance and public relations.

Feedback on undergraduate courses is particularly bad. Only 10% of students in London's central Saint Martin School of art and design (Central Saint Martins) expressed "satisfaction" or "very satisfied" with their commercial education at the undergraduate level. Donna Karan, Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford are the leading alumni of New York Parsons Design Institute (Parsons The New School of of), and the students' satisfaction is only 17%.

Generally speaking, the degree of satisfaction of the masters is slightly higher: 68% of the postgraduates are satisfied or very satisfied with the business education they receive. data Only 55%. But the satisfaction between schools is very uneven. Institut Fran AIS de la Mode is a master's degree institution in Paris. Its specialty is "combining management and design". 96% of the students in the school say "satisfied" or "very satisfied". The satisfaction degree of Polimoda in Florence is 69%, while the Istituto Marangoni school in Milan, London, Paris and Shanghai has a satisfactory degree of 39%. (Istituto) In addition, the poor performance of commercial education in the top ranking colleges has lowered their scores. Central Saint Martin's satisfaction is only 14%, while the London s Royal College of Art, the highest ranking master's curriculum, has only 24% satisfaction rate. At Royal College of Art in Antwerp, only 17% of postgraduate students said they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their business education.

Students who study in the most prestigious fashion schools have higher expectations of their business education and may be more disappointed with reality. However, this gap does not fully explain why there is such a big gap between the low degree of satisfaction of business education and the overall satisfaction of these schools.

A central Saint Martin student wrote: "in undergraduate teaching, we do not have a technical or business course. If you want to go, they will tell you that you can learn elsewhere. Another added: "they do not help us prepare to face the world we are facing. There is no achievement in fashion business. "

In the past 3 years, perhaps to respond to its commercialization, the Parsons Institute has revised its undergraduate curriculum syllabus to closely integrate business and creative teaching. However, a student feels that the balance is seriously biased towards another extreme: "Parsons's curriculum lacks a lot of applied knowledge, because they work hard to teach young people. Designer We need to become more conceptual.

Less famous institutions have the highest satisfaction rate in undergraduate courses, such as Drexel University and Philadelphia University in Philadelphia University, which have received more than 70% satisfaction and satisfaction. The Stephens school (Stephens College) has an index of up to 80%.

So what do they have in common in schools that get high scores in business education? First of all, they are very closely related to fashion business in the real world, such as providing internship opportunities, collaborating with companies or evaluating their performance by executives.

At Drexel University, all junior students of fashion department have to work in the industry for 6 months, and 100% of the students have to take part in practice or practice, while all the masters of fashion department must attend at least three national or international level. Design Competition 。

An alumni of Drexel University commented: "paid internship programs are very valuable to me. In my senior year, there were 4 job offers in February, thanks to the reputation of our school and alumni network."

One of the school's design and marketing professionals praised it as "a perfect balance between design and business," which involves "design thinking and problem-solving capabilities, as well as challenges in marketing, finance, and promotion."

The business education of French Fashion Institute has received 96% master degree students' satisfaction. The school's admissions committee has many high-ranking personages from fashion and luxury Brand Company. They provide vivid and authentic case teaching to students, and are responsible for judging their final graduation projects. Students of design major include opportunities to work for C, line, Herm s, Louis Vuitton and Chanel.

"High quality and diverse courses helped me develop a critical vision of the fashion industry, and I gained a wealth of knowledge to understand the product and brand image from an economic, business and technological perspective," wrote a student at the French Fashion Institute.

In the NY Immersion program at Philadelphia University, students will spend a semester in New York's clothing industry and design and marketing team to learn about product development. "Immersion" According to the data provided by the school, 90% of the students had at least one internship.

Stephens college is a female school in Columbia, Missouri, Missouri, where internships are mandatory. The Council of corporate executives and bank officials will assess students' Graduation Designs from marketing and promotion programs, retail merchandising plans and budgetary oversight.

However, one student hinted that the school did not produce any famous fashion designer, "because the school did not promote students' strong desire to create and dilute it, instead of turning women into tools of enterprise design."

From the perspective of academies, although their students think they do not get enough business education, the same group of students often do not choose the relevant courses offered by the institutions. In Parsons, his undergraduate and master's degree of satisfaction was 21%, but according to the data provided by the school, only 32% of the fashion design undergraduates participated in the business elective courses provided by 2013/2014 in the academic year. This year, this figure has dropped to 26%. The 42 design department students took these courses only because they got relevant introduction in the fall of 2014, only 7 of them chose business related courses.

"Most of them found out after graduation a few years later," I wish I had gotten more business education, "says Danilo Venturi, the current business leader at parimda college. He is about to become the headmaster of the College:" motivating everyone is still a challenge for us. "