When you are just beginning to decide what you want to do for the rest of your life it can be difficult to know what path to take. You don't have enough knowledge about that industry to know where to go to find a quality education. I was one of the lucky ones, I just happened to pick a good school to go to and I am very fortunate that I didn't pick one of the other options. Most people that are trying to get their education as a graphic designer may start out by searching on the internet. The problem with this is that good schools don't advertise, or at least in my opinion the good schools don't. From my experience people that ended up going to schools such as the Art Institute ended up paying more for an education that was not as good as they could have gotten from a four year university. Now I don't want to completely bad mouth the Art Institute, maybe there are some of these schools out their that can give their students a good degree. One thing I do know about their program, and it is the reason I decided against it, is that once you have a degree from there, you cannot get a master's degree when you are finished. I may never get one, but I like having the option to.

Their are some tricks that you can use to help you figure out which schools in your area give the best education for graphic design.

• Buy magazines from the industry. In these magazines their are usually student competitions that are held, this can show you which schools give a good education, because their students are winning competitions.
• Buy graphic design books from the industry and read about designers that will tell you which schools they went to.
• Join AIGA or other design organizations.
• Go to portfolio events and student exhibitions, you can be the judge, although this may be difficult because your limited knowledge may prohibit you from being a good critic.
• Find students on Facebook or MySpace and ask them if it is difficult at their school. The more they complain about how hard it is the better!
• Search for Design Colleges on Flickr, many design students will upload their school work and their peers work.
• Make sure the school has some type of Portfolio review process, at least at some point of the education, a good school will not just let anyone in.

Graphic Design can be a hard profession, but it doesn't have to be. If you enjoy what you are doing and want to get better you should definitely pursue it. The harder the school that you go to when you start out in the profession, the better designer you are going to be. This is going to mean quite a bit of sacrifice. There will be many all nighters and nights full of work, but anything worth having is not easy. Art School may sound like it would be a real breeze, but it is work, just like any other career. The good thing about it is if you are creative and enjoy creating, you will be more likely to love your work. Plus you can listen to music most of the time while you work!