What makes or breaks an artist? And is there a typical career path?
An ambitious national survey of arts-school graduates, which kicks off this year, seeks to answer those and other questions by providing a statistical portrait of the lives and careers of dancers, musicians, Web artists, painters, writers, and other members of the nation’s creative class.
The online survey, called the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, or SNAAP, will collect, analyze, and disseminate national data on graduates of college and high-school arts programs. It will be administered by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, along with Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.
Survey organizers will ask arts graduates who finished their training five, 10, 15, and 20 years earlier to complete an extensive online questionnaire about their training, job history, salary, mentors, and career successes and downfalls. Survey results could document, for example, how someone trained as a filmmaker or violinist made the decision to become a professional artist or follow a different path. That information will be used to help arts educators evaluate their curricula and determine how to better serve students, the arts community, and the public.
“There’s no data source like it,” says Steven J. Tepper, associate director of the Curb Center. “This project is a high-leverage way to understand and investigate the role that artists play in our economy, and the role that arts training plays in people’s lives more broadly. As opposed to saying, Let’s interview 20 artists and ask them what they need, which is historically how we’ve done research, this is a systematic look not only at artists but also at those who could have become artists but didn’t.”
The project will survey alumni of programs in music, the fine and performing arts, creative writing, architecture, and other fields. It will start with a pilot survey to be conducted this year and next, and continue with a full survey in 2010. Eventually the annual survey could involve as many as 2,000 institutions, including arts colleges, departmental programs that fall outside such colleges, conservatories, degree programs affiliated with museums, and arts-intensive high schools. Douglas Dempster, dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, welcomes the survey. “Professional arts schools traditionally have not done a great job of tracking outcomes in their own houses, never mind getting results nationally,” he says. “We all need to do a better job.”
The survey idea grew out of repeated requests from educators for more institutional data about arts alumni, says Ellen B. Rudolph, a program director at the Surdna Foundation, a New York-based family foundation that provided $2.5-million to start the project. The National Endowment for the Arts also gave $60,000. Eventually project organizers expect the survey to become self-sustaining through fees paid by participating institutions.
The arts survey is modeled after the National Survey of Student Engagement, which collects data on student involvement in academics and campus activities and is also administered by the Indiana center.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 47, Page B14
