Freelance senior creative Dotun Bello worked at various ad agencies in Lagos, Nigeria before coming to the U.S. in December 2015. Despite working on a Cristal award-winning campaign for a Heineken International subsidiary in Lagos, he found he couldn’t land a job in the U.S. until he went to portfolio school.

“Nobody was replying to my emails,” said Bello, who, after attending the since-closed Atlanta portfolio school Creative Circus, went on to work at agencies including Anomaly and TBWA\Chiat\Day.

The debate regarding the relevancy of portfolio schools has gained momentum in recent years as agencies look to balance an urgency to diversify their staffs with the pressures of declines in client budgets. But despite the desire to move away from portfolio schools as a feeder into the agency world, shops are still heavily reliant on them for entry-level employees. Arguably shops are too reliant, especially now as economic pressures force some to scale back critical training programs that would have allowed for them to hire people with different backgrounds.

Portfolio school is typically a two-year graduate program for creatives, including copywriters and designers, looking to build their portfolios and gain a better understanding of the ad industry. They’ve been criticized for their lack of diversity and costly tuition, which can range anywhere from $34,000 to upwards of $88,000 per year.

Some of the top portfolio schools include VCU Brandcenter, the Miami Ad School and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).

Also read: How to recruit in a post-portfolio world

“Unless you have portfolio school or a pretty good connection already existing at the agency, I don’t know that people are actually hiring those [professionals with] untraditional backgrounds,” said TikTok creator Ashley Rutstein, who posts under @StuffAboutAdvertising. “I think about when [activist and poet] Amanda Gorman read her poem at [U.S. President Joe Biden’s] inauguration. There were so many advertising leaders praising her and saying, ‘This is what we’re missing in advertising.’ But if a poet and their resume came across their desk, I don’t know if they would hire them.”

Rutstein, who is also a freelance creative director and part-time instructor at portfolio school Denver Ad School, posts informational videos on how to break into the ad industry in an effort to democratize the hard-to-access advertising education.

She’s part of a growing base of advertising influencers who have been increasingly trying to give people more affordable options to build their portfolios and learn the fundamentals of creating ads—two critical components to landing a job at a creative agency.

But even Rutstein, who mentors a lot of young creatives considering going to portfolio school, is torn about the experience. The biggest benefit to going to portfolio school is the mentorship it provides, Rutstein said.

“I personally didn’t go to portfolio school so I have a lot of heart for people who don’t have the means to do it,” Rutstein said. “I understand that it’s just not possible for a lot of people. With that, I try to point them to all of the free education online; there are a lot of people on YouTube, LinkedIn constantly sharing knowledge, but it also takes a lot of effort on your own part to get to the point where you can create a portfolio. Honestly, doing my free educational content has made me see the value of portfolio schools even more than I thought because one-on-one feedback and guidance are so important to improve your skills. And I would love to give that feedback to people who follow my content, but it’s just not possible. I would have to charge for it and I know that a lot of them can’t afford it.” 

Despite many agencies introducing mentorship programs and other employee training resources during the pandemic, shops are now financially strapped, and some are saying they don’t have the bandwidth to hire entry-level professionals without portfolio school training because so many of their hires need to juggle multiple responsibilities and hit the ground running when they start.

It’s a cycle that, in part, has the ad industry continuing to struggle with diversity. A recent 4A’s report found that diversity in several areas of the industry worsened in 2022 from 2021, including the number of agencies run or owned by a white CEO, which jumped to 90.2% from 73%.

Portfolio schools “are both helpful and they’re challenged,” Dentsu Americas Chief Equity Officer Christena Pyle said.

“They’re challenged, because even from the outset, going on to continue education [through] portfolio school is seen as a bit of a privilege and a financial barrier,” Pyle said. “For the same reason, us as agencies and holding companies look at a portfolio school and say, with those barriers to entry, are we going to get the best talent who can afford to have this added education? The affordability level there by proxy plays into diversity.”

Why agencies rely on portfolio school experience

Ad agencies are currently understaffed and undergoing massive transformation. Creative shops, in particular, are in the midst of layoffs and enacting hiring freezes as clients continue to conservatively plan their budgets amid the shaky economy; so getting your foot in the door and landing an ad job may be that much harder right now.

“Once upon a time there were many doors to go through to become a creative person in advertising. But over the years those doors narrowed to pretty much one—portfolio school,” said Tom Murphy, chief creative officer of Wunderman Thompson North America. 

Also read: Inside ad agencies’ employee shakeups

Murphy said people used to be able to make the jump into advertising from industries including art or journalism. “I know more than one person who began in account management but shifted to creative. But over the years it became harder and harder to break in if you hadn’t been to portfolio school. The quality level of spec books became so high,” he said.

Jonathan Schoenberg, executive creative director and partner at agency TDA Boulder, echoed that sentiment.

He said he didn’t go to ad school, but when he entered the industry in the mid-1990s, he was able to get his foot in the door as a secretary at top shops and learn from creatives along the way; something he doesn’t see as a possibility today. “I got into these great shops and luckily went to people like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ Today they’d just be like, ‘Who the hell hired you?’ Agencies are not set up for mentorship the way they were a decade ago,” Schoenberg said.

The “‘creator-verse’ is now allowing young people to demonstrate their talent in so many ways that it’s opening things up again. And that’s a good thing for the industry. More diverse perspectives, more unconventional thinking,” Murphy added. “Portfolio school is still the surest fire way to get in, but agencies now are a bit more willing to take a chance on someone who made incredible content outside the portfolio school system.”

Murphy said he personally only looks at where a job candidate studied after viewing the work. “I think the difference now is that as creative directors we can be moved by an amazing, tight spec book from a portfolio school. But we can get equally excited by the potential in someone’s films they created for social media,” he said.

Still, for some shops, the education at the top portfolio schools is seen as “invaluable,” said Bill Lindsey, executive creative director of agency Two by Four in Chicago.

“No place else instills the foundational pieces of strategy and concept like an ad school,” Lindsey said. “They intertwine to create the trunk of the tree; the branches are the countless ways they’re realized—in OOH, TV, print, social, experiential, radio.”

Lindsey said it’s “fairly easy to distinguish” between portfolios from graduates of ad schools versus ones without that experience. “The ad school portfolios are usually sharper, smarter books that resonate with a clear, consistent, dog-with-a-bone adherence to strategy,” he said.

“It would be amazing if we could move off ad schools but, as an agency owner, you are paying the same for a trained person versus a person without that training and rigor,” Schoenberg said. “That requires a lot of teaching and patience. The ad schools give young people a lot of knowledge, time and tools to be successful in the industry.”

Sasha Martens, industry recruiter and president at talent firm Sasha the Mensch, said portfolio schools “have a great deal of value” in providing industry-specific training that makes graduates better prepared for a job.

“Agencies and companies hire from portfolio schools or universities with strong ad programs because they know these students will have a level of industry understanding,” he said.

Mentorship problem 

One of the biggest reasons why ad agencies rely so heavily on portfolio schools appears to be because they are not internally equipped to mentor and train entry-level employees. 

There are advertisers looking to find talent outside of portfolio schools, but actually doing so depends on whether they have the proper resources to support that talent, Martens said. “Most companies don’t make such an investment and have limited areas to train and mentor.”

This is the case despite efforts in the wake of the murder of George Floyd to introduce mentorship and training programs designed to attract and retain diverse employees.

Look back: How ad agencies are living up to diversity promises

It’s unacceptable for agencies to use the excuse they don’t have the resources to train employees, said copy veteran and branding consultant Vikki Ross. Ross, who has always worked on the client side, said she was never hired at an agency because she didn’t have portfolio school experience and sees an underlying issue of—ad school background or not—agencies not doing enough to mentor juniors when they’re in the door.

“It’s the chicken and egg, isn’t it?” Ross said. “If you don’t have the resources to train people, then you’re not going to end up with good people doing good work. It’s an investment. You’re investing in your future by investing in who’s coming through; who’s going to take over when the senior people go. We’re going to end up with empty agencies or lackluster creative work. I mean, we’re already there in a lot of cases.”

Despite having introduced mentorship programs, some agencies may find difficulty hiring for entry-level creative roles right now because of the financial pressures that have them focused on profits, Pyle said.

Creating more affordable options

But some agencies are trying to rectify the issue by creating their own schools or internal programs to train the next generation of advertising creatives. 

Dentsu has introduced various mentorship and internal training programs, such as Dentsu University, which has allowed the company to hire anyone from account management to dog walkers to photographers into its creative department, Pyle said. She said the holding company has programs for helping people understand how to manage a profitable business, for example, and “will identify talent that might need additional support; we do a lot of that through our diversity work,” she added.

Creative production agency Hook in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has found success with an internal, ongoing training series called “Education Sprints” that was created during the pandemic and is led by Executive Design Director Mikell Fine-Iles.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ The Academy has a year-long, tuition-free program that leverages the Omnicom Group shop’s resources and executives to train people. Anyone can apply online to The Academy—applicants will need to show creative they’ve done but, according to the site, “​​It can be as simple as art you’ve made, music you’ve created or photos you’ve taken.”

VMLY&R, which WPP is merging with Wunderman Thompson to form VML, has several educational and training resources, including a free, 10-week program specifically for “Black and brown youth in Detroit,” called Detroit Experience Studio. People can apply for the program online in a similar fashion to The Academy’s application process.

Related: Reactions to the VML rebrand

Brands and agencies have also been increasingly partnering with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to recruit more talent from those schools in the ad industry.

Mentorship is a critical component of the One School—a free, 16-week portfolio school for Black creatives that was launched in 2020 to improve diversity in the industry. Led by Mother New York Chief Creative Officer Oriel Davis-Lyons, it was created in partnership with The One Club for Creativity.

“We have teachers and mentors,” Davis-Lyons said. “That’s quite different, as well, because the traditional school just has a teacher.

Future of portfolio schools

Enrollment at portfolio schools, for the most part, remains stable. At VCU Brandcenter, enrollment remains “consistent with pre-pandemic numbers,” said Vann Graves, associate dean and executive director of VCU Brandcenter. The enrollment for the class that will graduate in 2025 is 92. 

But it appears tides may be changing, due to pandemic pressures and a shifting mindset of Gen Z. Several portfolio schools, including Atlanta’s Creative Circus, Chicago Portfolio School and Miami Ad School in San Francisco, recently shuttered. (Miami Ad School has other locations in Miami, New York and Atlanta.)

Some in the ad industry don’t view portfolio school as the best way to train the next generation of professionals to keep up with all of the technological advancements and disruption happening in the industry, especially in a world that’s placed a higher priority on performance and data than traditional creative.

“Our industry requires some basic understanding of high-level concepts, but the rest of the work is mostly details related to execution and what is possible within the platforms. And the platforms change super fast,” said Daniel Romano, co-founder and CEO of performance marketing Good Moose. “Programs in big academic settings need to go over planning, approval processes, creation of the material. If someone wants to shape a program to teach media, they probably need to create it six to 12 months ahead of the actual delivery. By the time a student who learned from these lesson plans wants to actually put them into practice, they are likely going to be facing a completely different reality.”

Graves said VCU Brandcenter, like any organization, is trying to solve for all the disruption happening in the industry, but being in an educational environment can be beneficial for students in helping them navigate all this noise.

“The beauty of being in an educational environment is that we not only have the opportunity to embrace the latest technology, but we’re encouraged to play with it—and build it into the curriculum in real-time,” Graves said. “Sometimes that means we’ll leverage it in a classroom setting, and other times we’ll create a class around it. Regardless of how we use it, we recognize the outsized impact and growth of technology and the importance of teaching it… even while we learn it.”

Portfolio schools are also struggling to attract Gen Z, which does not want to be bogged down in debt and is seeking alternative education routes. One Gen Z marketer at a data agency said they started working at various ad companies as an undergraduate and learned a lot just by taking LinkedIn courses.

Ad agencies have already been losing talent to other industries, especially during the Great Resignation, and they may stand to lose more if they don’t broaden their talent searches beyond portfolio school.

“This paradigm shift in education, and where we get education, and who can afford education, is going to plague the representation in our industry,” Pyle said. “But I’ve seen schools try to address and retrofit for that. Of course, portfolio schools are careful to really understand their demographics and get the mix that agencies are looking for. And the mix that we’re looking for is just a diverse set of talent.”

For its part, Graves said VCU Brandcenter has specifically expanded recruiting efforts to reach students of diverse backgrounds and built up its scholarship funds “to provide more access to more students, many of whom have traditionally been left out of the industry.” That’s allowed the school to increase the percentage of racially and ethnically diverse students to 42% from 25% over the last five years, he said.

Still, TDA Boulder’s Schoenberg said there are only a handful of portfolio schools, meaning a limited number of professors teaching those students, creating a bigger issue of “sameness” in the portfolios coming out of them.

“The real miss is these programs are expensive, which means fewer people of lesser means enter the industry,” Schoenberg said.

Schoenberg said that he would like his agency to do a better job recruiting people from different backgrounds, but acknowledged that a lot of the standout resumes he sees are from people who attended portfolio schools.

“Advertising is just talking to itself because we learn about advertising and then we do advertising and I feel like what would make us so much better is if we can pull inspiration from other industries, like fashion and fine art and things that are not actual advertising,” Rutstein said. “That’s a big criticism, too, it’s like this is an interesting campaign, but do regular people care or is it just advertisers that care? That’s what we’re missing and we’re not finding people from different backgrounds.”