I have two important pieces of advice:
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Do not bother with ‘for profit’ schools. For profit school priorities are always to their shareholders and will do things like encourage you into ridiculous loans and make it difficult for you to leave, all in the name of maximising the amount of money they can extract from you as you are a customer and not a student - the quality of teaching is not their priority and it is often very poor as a result anyway.
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Take a look at how much debt you’ll be taking on by doing the course, then compare it to your projected salary. If you cannot pay off your accrued debt within about six years of finishing the course, ask yourself if it’s actually worth doing. Surely the point of doing a course is to gain skills and a diploma to help you get a job that pays well. If the course cost is so high that you’re stuck paying off debt and not seeing the benefit of your increased earnings, then there’s something very wrong.
Case in example, if you want to do Game Development at Full Sail, you’re looking at 5.25 semesters with an average cost of $14,900 per semester - or $78,225. Game Design online would set you back 8 semesters costing an average of $7,125 each - or $57,000. Now consider that there’s going to be interest on those debts, probably around 3.5% per annum.
A junior designer salary is around $45k - and you’d need to spend nearly $2750 of that just to pay the accrued interest on that game developer course. To pay it off in six years, you’re looking at paying back $16k or so a year. Can you live on $29k in the kinds of places game studios are located? Probably not.
Realistically as an American, you’d actually be better off going to Europe these days and getting a degree there. The quality of teaching is WAY higher, and it can cost less in the long run. German universities as an example usually charge less than $750 per year (not per semester).