Preparedness for Life After RISD Initiative

After receiving the President’s charge in the spring, the working group began to focus its work on several areas to better understand and assess how RISD prepares students for life after graduation.  We reached out to many stakeholders and explored, through five subgroups, the following areas: student experience, alumni experience, faculty perspectives, industry and employer views, and best practices. In addition, we conducted interviews with institutional leaders and the families of our students.

Through numerous surveys, interviews, expert research, industry reports, available data and roundtable discussions with these stakeholder groups, we collected insights from more than 400 sources. Our findings from this assessment indicate the potential to look at building a larger ecosystem for alumni engagement, industry connections, professional practices, business skills development and the expansion of RISD's presence globally.

Over the summer, the working group began to explore numerous themes and potential big ideas that would advance the institution’s goals. We continue to explore the changing context and trends in creative professional life, and to engage our community as a whole, ensuring access with a social equity and inclusion lens. This fall, the working group will continue to engage our community as we work towards recommendations to President Williams in December 2024. If you have an questions or suggestions please email strategy@risd.edu 

March 26, 2024

To: Staff, Faculty

Subject: Preparedness for Life After RISD Working Group

RISD graduates emerge into a complex, global, interconnected, transdisciplinary, competitive and costly landscape. It is vital that they have command of their chosen discipline; possess the habits of mind and action that characterize artists, designers and creative leaders of genuinely original and transformative practice; and are prepared to engage the world of work effectively upon graduation. I am pleased to announce a new initiative, “Preparedness for Life After RISD”, a multifaceted effort based on equity principles focused on further bolstering post-graduation success.

Composed of students, faculty, staff, alums and art and design professionals, this working group is charged with producing a comprehensive report and set of recommendations that envisions a strategic and comprehensive direction for post-graduation success that is sensitive to the differences between vocational and art and design education.

Indeed, good work is already happening across the institution focused on preparing students to lead productive lives as artists, designers and creative leaders. Offices like the RISD Career Center, faculty members who integrate students into a collective network of experienced working artists and designers, academic departments that incorporate post-college preparedness into their courses, visiting artist series, student-led clubs like E-Ship and programs featuring or capitalizing on alums reflect a strong and collective commitment to ensuring post-graduation success.

There are wonderful programs across campus. Integrating them more deeply and systemically across the student experience will further strengthen student outcomes. Further, through robust analysis, discernment and visioning, we have a vital opportunity to also address existing gaps and create a more cohesive and integrated approach to supporting students—one that capitalizes on and deepens existing good work and ambitiously and appropriately augments that work. To achieve this goal, we will be devoting greater focus in the months ahead to ensure that, coupled with the exceptional art and design education they receive, RISD students are also prepared for a successful professional life after RISD—no matter what field(s) or course of action they choose to pursue.

Among the scope of its charge, the working group for Preparedness for Life After RISD will focus on the following:

• Clear definitions of “prepared for life after RISD” and “post-graduation success” that are sensitive to the essential difference between vocational education and art and design education.
• Obtaining and analyzing relevant data (i.e., qualitative and quantitative, including longitudinal) regarding post-graduation success at RISD, among AICAD schools and art and design majors at research universities, etc., taking special care to understand disaggregated demographic data where possible (e.g., gender, race, nationality, first-generation-to-college status, etc.).
• Identifying ways alums might be effectively engaged on a larger, more strategic scale in promoting post-graduation success (e.g., scaling or expanding current programs, sunsetting existing programs to accommodate new ones, creating new technology-based interventions, etc.).
• Gathering information about how industry professionals are engaged across the college and assessing whether different, added or more systematic frameworks are needed.
• Gathering information about successful mentorship programs, including costs, administrative structures, etc., and, if mentorship is a key finding of the analysis, articulating such distinctive qualities at RISD, including staffing, structure, etc., in a mentorship program proposal.
• Suggesting specific ways RISD can create more robust, productive, systemic and strategic networks to benefit post-graduation success, paying particular attention to the global nature of our student body.

We aim to emerge from this project with an overarching and cohesive strategy and, potentially, a centralizing structure predicated on a deeply informed landscape analysis, data and consultations with key stakeholders on and off campus. The resulting exploration and recommendations will be ambitious and worthy of our students.

I have asked Bill Foulkes, senior critic in Industrial Design, to chair this working group. The members of the group are listed below. Their report and recommendations are due in December 2024.

We realize that their efforts will be complex and involve many on this campus and beyond, including faculty, staff, students, alums, parents and employers. I thank all participants in advance for their time and energy in strengthening our work in this area.

Sincerely,
Crystal Williams (she/her)
President