About StudyCreative

The information a person needs before borrowing for a creative degree is public, and almost nobody puts it in front of them. The federal government publishes what each program’s graduates earn four years after finishing and what they owed on the day they did. Schools do not lead with it. The comparison sites that rank schools are paid by those schools, and a program costing $80,000 against median earnings of $38,000 does not survive that arrangement.

We built this site to publish those figures exactly as the government reports them, for the six fields where the distance between the marketing and the outcome is widest: audio and music, film and video, games, design, marketing, and software. Across all six, students borrow roughly the same amount. What they earn afterwards runs from about $44,000 a year to about $80,000. That is the decision a prospective student is actually making, and it is rarely shown to them as one.

Our editor, Robert March, spent fifteen years inside creative-industry education, most of them as an administrator, on the side of the desk that recruits and enrols. That experience is why the site is built the way it is: every figure links to its federal source, a suppressed figure shows as a dash rather than an estimate, and the parts of each field the data cannot describe — what the work is like, what entry level really pays — are written from having seen it rather than from a brochure.

Every other site in this category is funded by the schools it ranks. That makes it commercially difficult for them to publish a program costing $80,000 against median earnings of $38,000. We are not paid by the institutions we cover, so we publish the figure either way.

We make no claims of our own about employment or earnings. We report federal data as the federal source reports it, we link to that source on every figure, and where the data is thin or suppressed we say so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.

We do earn revenue when someone asks to be connected with a provider. How that works, and what it does and does not influence, is set out in full on our advertiser disclosure.

Three public federal sources: IPEDS for institutional cost and completion, the College Scorecard for median earnings four years after completion, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics for occupational wages and outlook. All three are free, public, and used by every serious publisher in the category.

What differs is the treatment. We cover six creative verticals rather than all ninety-plus fields of study, which lets us map programs to occupations properly instead of averaging across a whole major. Our methodology sets out exactly how, and where it falls short.

We are not a school, an accreditor, or an admissions service. We do not offer instruction, process applications, or give personalised financial advice. If a decision matters, verify the figures with the institution before you act on them.

Corrections are welcome and taken seriously — if a figure on this site is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. Contact us.