Why Fashion Schools Are Struggling to Justify Their Cost in 2025

The fashion industry produces roughly 5,000 graduates annually across the UK alone, but lacks sufficient entry-level jobs to absorb them, creating persistent unemployment and systemic underemployment for new graduates.

Summary of Is Fashion School Still Worth It?. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:02:19 — The UK has 213 fashion design courses at the bachelor level, with some schools enrolling only 10 students while prestigious institutions like Central Saint Martins accept around 50 per cohort, resulting in approximately 5,000 new graduates entering the job market every year.
• 00:03:43 — Unpaid internships exclude working-class students from gaining experience, even in countries with government-backed student loans, because only those with financial safety nets can afford to work without pay.
• 00:05:49 — Students have unrealistic salary expectations, with entry-level positions in fashion publishing paying around 26,000 pounds, far below what graduates anticipate based on media portrayals of the industry.
• 00:08:43 — Social media roles now require multiple technical skills beyond writing, including photo shooting, video editing in professional software, strategy analysis, and audience data interpretation—capabilities often not taught in traditional fashion degree programs.
• 00:14:06 — Highly selective schools like IFM in Paris and Lacombe in Belgium maintain significant advantages through rigorous admissions, alumni networks, and direct recruitment relationships with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Dior.
• 00:17:22 — Universities struggle to incorporate AI training because the technology evolves faster than institutions can develop curricula, making new training programs obsolete before implementation.
• 00:18:27 — Students using AI tools like ChatGPT for research skip the critical analytical process, meaning they may graduate without developing the curiosity and judgment needed to identify fresh trends versus recycled ideas.
• 00:27:37 — Gen Z students prioritize work-life balance and the elimination of unpaid internships, contrasting sharply with older generations who viewed fashion careers as all-consuming identities requiring constant availability.
• 00:30:08 — Fashion education curricula often ignore the Global South despite higher GDP growth there, focusing instead on European luxury traditions while missing emerging markets in modest fashion, climate-conscious design, and products for aging populations.

In depth

Too many graduates, not enough jobs

The starting point for Dan Hastings’ argument is arithmetic, not sentiment. He tallied the fashion design courses listed on UCAS in the UK alone and found 213 bachelor’s programmes, ranging from tiny ten-person cohorts to the roughly fifty-strong intakes at Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion 00:02:28. Run that math across a single graduating year and Hastings arrives at something like 5,000 new fashion design graduates entering the UK job market annually 00:02:46, and that’s before counting the unemployed graduates from previous years still queued up ahead of them 00:03:01. His point isn’t that the degrees are worthless in isolation, it’s that the industry simply doesn’t have 5,000 new roles to absorb every summer, so the maths of oversupply is baked into the system before a single student ever submits a CV 00:03:17.

That oversupply doesn’t hit everyone equally. Hastings argues the real sorting mechanism is the unpaid internship, which functions as an invisible tuition fee layered on top of the actual one. In London, he says, most people chasing internships have family money behind them, while those without it are forced to work nights and weekends just to stay in the game, effectively pricing working-class students out of the entry-level market even after they’ve cleared the much harder hurdle of paying for the degree itself 00:03:43. He notes the UK’s government-backed student loans make the degree itself accessible in a way it isn’t in the US, but that access evaporates the moment the unpaid-internship bottleneck kicks in 00:04:03.

Host Sheena Butler-Young pushes on where responsibility sits: if schools are taking six-figure tuition and sending students into a five-thousand-deep queue for a shrinking number of jobs, do they owe prospective students a much blunter disclosure about the odds? Neither speaker resolves this cleanly. Hastings doesn’t defend the schools, but he also frames the saturation as a structural, industry-wide phenomenon rather than a specific institution’s failure to be honest, which leaves the accountability question hanging rather than answered 00:04:31.

The salary gap and the Devil Wears Prada problem

Hastings offers a concrete, almost startling data point to illustrate how disconnected student expectations are from market reality: in a guest lecture quiz he ran for University of South Wales students, he asked them to guess the 2025 starting salary for a fashion writer at Marie Claire in London. The correct answer, around £26,000, was missed by nearly the entire room 00:05:49. He traces this directly to a media diet built on Devil Wears Prada and Gossip Girl, which sold students a version of the industry defined by glamour rather than entry-level pay stubs 00:06:04. It’s a small anecdote, but Hastings uses it to argue something larger: schools aren’t just failing to teach hard skills, they’re failing to correct a fantasy about what a fashion career actually pays and how quickly it pays it.

Butler-Young corroborates this from the employer side, noting that hiring managers she’s spoken with report entry-level hires arriving with the expectation of face time with the CEO in their first week 00:06:39. Both speakers treat this as a symptom of the same underlying disconnect: students aren’t being given an accurate picture of career pacing, whether that’s about salary, seniority, or how long it takes to be taken seriously in a role.

What’s left unresolved is whether this is a failure of the schools specifically, or of a broader cultural narrative about fashion that schools inherit and don’t actively push back against. Hastings doesn’t claim curricula are lying to students; rather, he suggests the gap between aspiration and market reality simply isn’t addressed head-on in most classrooms, and it takes something as blunt as a Kahoot quiz to make the discrepancy visible to students who otherwise coast on assumptions.

AI, curiosity, and what a degree can no longer guarantee

The AI conversation splits into two related but distinct claims. The first is practical: universities and employers alike are struggling to build AI training because, as HR podcast host Heba Youssef told Hastings, the technology moves fast enough that any curriculum built around a specific tool is obsolete by the time it’s rolled out 00:17:22. Hastings extends this to assessment itself, arguing that widespread AI use is corroding the university’s ability to verify that students actually understand the material they’re being examined on 00:17:42.

The second, more consequential claim is about what AI is doing to the underlying skill of curiosity. Hastings recounts a workshop exercise where he asked student groups to research an unfamiliar country and surface a fresh fashion or beauty trend; when he asked one group how they arrived at their insight, the answer was simply that they’d asked ChatGPT 00:18:22. His concern isn’t that students used a tool, it’s that the entire intermediate process of research, discernment, and judgement about what actually counts as fresh got skipped, and he’s not confident students are leaving their degrees having ever built that muscle 00:18:39. Butler-Young reframes this as a mismatch of emphasis: she argues schools are focused on teaching AI mechanics, which she calls the easy part, when the actually valuable and much harder thing to teach is judgment, cultural nuance, and collaborative skill, the things AI can’t do for you 00:20:45.

Interestingly, the data suggests the anxiety around this is not evenly distributed by generation. BOF’s own careers survey, previewed on the show, found that of roughly a thousand people working in or aspiring to work in fashion, it’s the under-25 aspiring cohort, not older incumbents, who report the most negative feelings about AI’s impact on the industry 00:19:39. That’s a genuine surprise worth flagging: the group closest to the technology and most fluent in using it day to day is also the most pessimistic about what it means for their own career prospects, and neither speaker fully explains why, though Hastings notes separately that many students are so wary of platform addiction that they deliberately avoid apps like TikTok despite understanding them intimately 00:19:08.

Prestige, access, and the disappearing craft of transmission

Hastings pushes back gently on the idea that school pedigree is losing its currency, arguing certain institutions still command real leverage. He points to IFM in Paris, chaired historically by Yves Saint Laurent co-founder Pierre Bergé and currently presided over by former Dior and LVMH Fashion CEO Sidney Toledano, as a school whose selectivity and brand-level scholarships create direct pipelines into luxury houses 00:13:48. He backs this with a Financial Times report on La Cambre in Belgium, a design school so difficult that its first-year cohort of 15 to 20 students shrinks further as people fail out, and whose graduate show this year reportedly drew a Louis Vuitton headhunter 00:14:41. For Hastings, this isn’t prestige for its own sake, it’s evidence that intense selectivity and institutional rigor still buy access that a less selective, higher-volume programme simply can’t replicate 00:15:08.

But alongside that access sits a separate, more melancholy problem: craft knowledge that has no reliable mechanism for transmission. Hastings recalls a documentary by Loïc Prigent featuring a woman who worked under Gabrielle Chanel and possessed a singular technique for manipulating fabric fiber known as galon. Chanel reportedly sent apprentices to learn from her directly, but none could replicate her skill, and when she died the technique died with her 00:25:04. He uses this to argue that luxury houses are very good at performing craftsmanship publicly, through things like Chanel’s Métiers d’Art programme or Loewe’s craft exhibitions, but far less reliable at actually transferring tacit, hands-on know-how to the next generation of workers 00:25:31.

Where this becomes contested is in who bears responsibility for that gap. Butler-Young reports that many industry executives blame early-career workers themselves, saying they’re chasing glamorous creative-director fantasies rather than putting in years at the atelier bench 00:26:02. Hastings doesn’t fully accept or reject that framing; he simply notes he doesn’t know of a credible path today by which a London fashion design graduate could realistically apprentice under a sixty-year veteran Chanel artisan, suggesting the missing infrastructure, not just missing willingness, is the real bottleneck 00:25:41.

Generational rupture over what a fashion career is for

The clearest disagreement in the episode isn’t between the two speakers but between generations of fashion workers, as reported by Hastings. He frames it as a shift in what a job is supposed to mean: many millennials, himself included, treated a fashion or journalism career as identity, worth extreme hours and constant availability, whereas the Gen Z students he surveys explicitly want a good career without wanting it to consume their entire life 00:27:16. In BOF’s own careers survey of roughly 250 student respondents, the recurring demands were work-life balance, an end to unpaid internships, and an end to nepotism, which Hastings reads as a coherent generational agenda rather than a scattering of complaints 00:27:44.

The friction point, as he describes it, is managerial: line managers in their 40s and 50s were themselves trained to treat constant Slack and Teams availability as table stakes, and they react badly when a younger report simply logs off at 5:30 and declines to hand out a personal phone number 00:28:39. Butler-Young, notably, doesn’t fully side with either camp; she says she’ll keep her personal opinions out of it, but suggests the resolution has to come from middle management letting go of a specific, punitive logic: expecting new hires to suffer exactly as much as they did, for no better reason than that it happened to them 00:29:17.

This thread connects back to the craftsmanship and access discussions, because it reframes the

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.