Throwback Thoughts /

Why Don’t High Schools Prepare Kids for CalArts? (Throwback Thoughts)

• June 5, 2026
• thoughts  
• art  
• education  
• high school  
• university  
• learning  

Most of this text was originally written in April 2022, though I have edited and added to it since then. The footnotes, in particular, were all written directly prior to posting this text here. (Can you tell that I love footnotes?)

I recently saw a tweet that said something along the lines of “it ticks me off that high schools don’t prepare kids for schools like CalArts.”¹ This idea kind of bugs me, because as someone who graduated from a magnet arts high school with a selective application process,

1. No high school can prepare you for CalArts – only you can do that (that is, it is completely on you to prepare yourself);

2. I’m not sure if you actually want your high school to prepare you for CalArts – are you willing to endure that level of trauma as a teenager?

3. The reason why a regular high school can’t prepare you for CalArts is because no elementary or middle school is going to prepare you for a high school that can prepare you for CalArts;

4. It’s true that if your high school tried to prepare you you’d have a better chance. However, I think the real issue is the inaccessibility of formal arts education and how difficult it is to get access to it without also having had access to private arts education from a young age;

5. No matter how prepared you are; if you’re shooting for CalArts (or for any school of that caliber, mind you) it’s kinda luck of the draw.

Having said that, here are some clarifications:

1. It’s true that attending a school with a stronger arts program will have benefits such as having access to more resources, experiences, and opportunities.² You will likely also have more qualified teachers who will provide better instruction and these are advantages for sure! This is especially true if the only way you would have access to these experiences would be if your high school offered them, because you can’t afford them otherwise. However, the students who get into schools like CalArts are insane and put in hours of self study on top of whatever they do in school, and many of them probably also have money to spend on self-education. No matter what high school you attend, and no matter the caliber of program it offers, it cannot help you attain that level of skill unless you put in the extra hours yourself.

2. I chose to go to an arts high school for their creative writing program and got burned out on writing afterwards. During the time I was in the program, I actually quit writing poetry entirely and was only able to revisit it after I had graduated. This kind of experience was shockingly common at my school,³ and this is why I question whether or not people should actually want the average high school to be pushing students to the level required to get into a competitive post-secondary arts school. It’s… a lot of work, and you need to keep in mind that you also have to put in a lot of preparatory work in your middle school years to get to the level where you can do that work in high school. Those of us who cose to attend an arts program in high school put in that extra work in middle school on our own time, of our own free will.⁴ I… really don’t think that kind of work ethic should be mandatory at the elementary and middle school level, during which art classes are still mandatory.

3. Assuming we did want to make rigorous art education mandatory in the primary phase of education, elementary and middle schools typically don’t have that many teachers who know what they’re talking about or resources for students to use. I’m not sure about you but my experiences in elementary and middle school arts classes were… mixed depending on which school I went to and what the subject was.

4. A lot of the people who went to my school for the visual arts program had taken private art lessons prior to their admission, and some continued to take these lessons throughout their time at the school. So clearly, blaming high schools for not preparing students isn’t the crux of the problem – the problem exists at the high school level as well if people need to take private lessons just to be good enough to get in.

5. Even if you manage to get good enough to get into a top program, there are a lot of other people with that skillset. It follows that you’re probably going to get rejected anyway, especially if your goal is CalArts. There are too many qualified applicants and not enough spaces.

I feel like I could say so much more. If I were the author of that tweet, I would probably be questioning the validity of institutions like CalArts instead and asking why it’s so hard to get into an arts school without already being an amazing artist. That’s like requiring someone to already be amazing at programming to get into a Computer Science program. While some schools do operate that way,⁵ I question the validity of their admissions systems as well.