Brooks Institute Faces Closure???

Have you guys seen this:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp...essage=14326909

It's a post on a message board, so who knows if it's a reliable source or not, but I find it interesting.

It says the original article is by "Times Staff Writer" so I'm assuming LA times. If it's true, what a bummer, for many reasons.

Cheers

James

I don't think they'll get shut down. They're a legacy institution and an asset to Santa Barbara and Ventura. Corrective measures will probably be implemented.

The part about students getting over promised on job placement and future income is probably true. You would not believe some of the stories I hear on the local dive boats and dive shops about Brooks students. Somehow even when they are just getting certified to dive, they talk about all the money that they're going to make shooting underwater.

I talked with a girl who is/was a Brooks student. She is an UW photographer who works in a dive shop and a camera store. She turned out to be one of the 13 students interviewed by the state agency that made the charges. She said she basically felt they were true. I also know several people who are professors or work in Admin at the school. They are people of unimpeachable integrity.

The charges, which were written in the LA Times, are that the school oversells the job prospects for it's students. The charges seem to come from after Ernie Brooks sold the school to a for profit company that runs vocational type colleges.

I know a lot of photographers that have gone to Brooks. The ones I know want to be UW photographers and/or great outdoors/action photographers. They stay in the Santa Barbara area which is way overstocked with professionally trained photographers. It would be a miracle in my mind if many of them had found the kind of jobs at the money suggested that supposedly was promised by the school to prospective students.