At the Maryland Institute College of Art’s graduation on Monday, interim President Cecilia McCormick asked the undergraduate class of 2024 to look into a mirror.
“To be an artist, you have to be true to who you are,” McCormick said.
The 200-year-old art and design school, which promotes itself online as “an institution that continually re-invented itself to meet the challenges of changing times,” has recently had its own self-reflecting to do. The challenges of the past few years’ changing times, including a pandemic-induced dip in enrollment and faculty layoffs, have hurt the college. How badly remains an open question for the school both heavily reliant on tuition dollars for revenue and vital to the broader Baltimore art scene.
“They’ve got to get their act together,” former MICA President Fred Lazarus said of the school. “You’ve got to grow yourself out of this problem.”
MICA draws its origins back to the Athenaeum Institute, founded in 1826 in downtown Baltimore, in part to train craftsmen for the Baltimore Ohio Railroad. Today, the school’s main campus is in Bolton Hill, with a significant real estate footprint in the adjacent Station North Arts District.
Historically, the college has both a strong academic reputation nationally and a track record of sustaining the city’s art landscape, from galleries to the streets. The campus hosts Baltimore’s Artscape festival, which returned last year following a coronavirus pandemic hiatus.
MICA did not provide answers to questions and declined multiple interview requests for McCormick and other administrators.
Lowered enrollment
MICA lost nearly a quarter of its undergraduate students during the onset of the pandemic.
Between 2010 and 2019, fall enrollment never fell below 1,650 full-time undergraduates, according to federal data. In the fall of 2019, MICA’s enrollment for full-time undergraduate students was 1,689. But by fall 2020, that dropped to 1,254.
Full-time undergraduate enrollment rebounded to 1,485 students in fall 2021 before slipping again to 1,336 in fall 2022, the last year with available federal data.
“The pandemic had a terrible very specific impact on arts and design education. Many of the driving factors in enrollment at art-and-design-specific institutions have to do with access to materials, tools and being in an active creative community,” said Deborah Obalil, president of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, which includes MICA and 39 others around the U.S. and Canada.
Obalil said AICAD enrollment peaked right before the pandemic and has not returned. “A significant amount” of that decline was related to international students.
MICA says international students make up 24% of its student body. Rey Reyes, a stop-motion animator, sculptor, makeup artist and 2024 graduate from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, said she lost housing when the campus closed in 2020 and was briefly homeless.
“I think that at that moment, the administration had a lack of support for international students,” Reyes said after graduation on Monday. “Perhaps they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I still think a lot of the decisions they took during COVID were fast and irresponsible.”
Sydney Lindman, another 2024 graduate, said her drawing major has been folded into the general fine arts department. She might have been the last drawing major to graduate from MICA.
“I’m pretty disappointed about it. It was really hard for me to find a school that had drawing as a major when I was first applying. I think MICA having a drawing program was one of the reasons I picked it…” Lindman said. “I didn’t really get to experience what I wanted to experience from MICA.”
MICA has received more applications in recent years, but that hasn’t translated to more students enrolling. According to federal data, 3,066 students applied in fall 2021, 2,629 were admitted, and 12% of those enrolled. Applicants increased to 3,139 for the fall of 2022, 2,498 were admitted, and only 9% enrolled.
The school’s budget relies heavily on enrollment. According to federal data for fiscal year 2022, 90% of MICA’s revenue was from tuition and fees.
And the cost of attendance has been rising. Undergraduate tuition climbed by over $4,500 in two years, from $49,190 in 2020-21 to $53,815 in 2022-23, not including campus room and board, according to federal data.
Before retiring in 2014, Lazarus watched art schools like the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design be absorbed into George Washington University, while music and dance conservatory the Peabody Institute was absorbed into the Johns Hopkins University.
However, he said, “I think the trend is small arts schools closing rather than being absorbed. And I think the midsize art school [in the 1,000-to-1,500-student range] is a really hard entity to support.”
MICA’s finances
MICA made over $63 million in revenue from tuition and another $12.4 million from housing and meal plan sales in 2022, according to an audit, conducted by accounting organization KPMG, that is required for nonprofits that receive at least $750,000 in federal grant money per fiscal year. Government grants, investments and donations totaled $82 million in revenue, but the school had over $91 million in expenses. MICA’s endowment is around $109 million.
As of May 2022, MICA owed an annual principal debt payment of around $1.5 million, due in 2023 and rising to $2.7 million by 2027, according to the audit. The purpose of the debt is unclear.
Mostly between 2004 and 2014, the school invested in property in the Station North Arts District, building housing and studio space, as well as the Fred Lazarus IV Center that houses graduate school offices in 2014. Now, it has $160 million in property and equipment assets, according to the audit.
Staffing
Lazarus was replaced by President Samuel Hoi, who left in December after announcing his retirement in August. MICA said it aims to hire a new president this summer.
In September 2020, the faculty assembly gave Hoi a unanimous vote of no confidence, citing a disorganized administration teetering on chaos.
“Hoi implemented a massive and rapid expansion of a bureaucracy in serious need of a structural overhaul. We were really afraid [Hoi] and his administration were going to do irreparable damage to the school,” said James Rouvelle, a former professor and department chair who helped organize the vote of no confidence. “He loved to rebrand and rename existing offices. It was Sammy’s tower of institutional Babel and, for most of us, unnavigable.”
In response to the vote, the Board of Trustees released a statement backing Hoi and pledging “to begin a dialogue with faculty.”
Hoi could not be reached for comment.
In March 2023, Hoi announced layoffs, starting with a voluntary separation program for unionized and nonunionized full-time faculty and staff.
“MICA needs to become leaner and more agile as an educational provider,” he wrote in a letter at the time. “MICA is seizing a challenging moment in its history to do the hard and necessary work of adapting and evolving its model to meet the needs of today’s students and society.”
According to tax records, Hoi made at least $523,000 annually between 2016 and 2022, peaking at over $611,354 in 2020.
In the fiscal year ending in May 2022, 17 vice presidents, vice provosts and directors made an average of over $188,000 per year, according to tax records. In total, 47 individuals received at least $100,000 in annual compensation.
MICA had a comparatively large management staff at 128 positions in fall 2022. A dozen other art and design schools with similar applicants, budgets, staff and other factors per the National Center for Education Statistics, had an average of 66 management staff members.
The same year, MICA had 294 instructional staff compared to an average of 205 at similar institutions. The college lost nearly 20% of full-time faculty between 2018 and 2022, dropping from 152 to 126, according to federal data.
“Something I want to stress is that I think the faculty is what makes the institution. I think often we praise institutions more than the faculty, and I think that’s wrong,” said Reyes, who was voted by her classmates to deliver a speech at graduation. “I don’t think that MICA exists as a monolith. You know, I think MICA can be called ‘the administration,’ but what is the role of students and teachers actively engaging in the process of art-making? I think those are two completely different institutions, if you will.”
MICA’s place in the art and design landscape
Those close to the school say a lot more than degrees are at stake if MICA were to continue to shrink or shutter.
“For those institutions that are closed, it is felt years later …” Obalil said. “These are major institutions that supported the arts and created the pipeline of artists working in the community, that kind of center of gravity for artists and designers to be creative and do what they do.”
She cited curriculum as a critical factor in remaining relevant: “When we look at the institutions that have not succeeded over time, there are different factors in all causing closure or merger, but one of the threads is lack of innovation in curriculum.”
Obalil and Lazarus pointed to MICA’s master’s degree in social design, aimed at preparing students to advance equity and social justice, as a successful innovation in curriculum. Meanwhile, its Art & Design College Accelerator Program helps Baltimore public school students explore and apply to art schools.
“Citywide, there are barriers to art school, from the financial component to building a portfolio,” said MICA graduate Leah Hucker, a teacher at the Baltimore Design School and whose students benefited from the portfolio support program. “I think MICA has been around for years and is still very influential in the entire Baltimore art scene. I think having that local institution collaborating with public schools gives students access to becoming part of that scene that they might not have had.”
Julia Di Bussolo earned two degrees from MICA and is now executive director of nonprofit Arts Every Day, which focuses on equitable access to arts instruction around the city. She said through musical instruments, professional development for teachers and after-school programs, the nonprofit reaches 20,000 city students each year.
As an undergrad at MICA, she worked in a community arts partnership program that put her in after-school spaces. She said the experience “fundamentally changed my trajectory,” keeping her rooted to Baltimore City.
“It’s important that our public K-12 and our higher education are all working in partnership as an arts and cultural community for years to come,” Di Bussolo said. “If we’re not providing pathways from elementary through high school and making sure that students feel welcome, that they are a part of the museums, the BSO, the theaters, Artscape, then who is going to support that over time? Who will be up on stage?”
