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Overview of the International Academy of Design and Technology (IADT)
The International Academy of Design and Technology, or IADT, was the post-retirement brainchild of a former Sears & Roebuck executive who found himself restless and bored in retirement and devised the International Academy of Merchandising and Design (as it was called at the time) to promote the skills he’d acquired in a lengthy, successful career. Within a decade of its founding in 1977, the IAMD had opened a second outlet in Tampa, Florida and the fleet of its affiliates was launched.
Today, with a name change and a broadened and modernized curriculum, the IADT can claim a total of about a dozen different campuses in metro areas as diverse as Chicago, Seattle, Orlando, Detroit, Las Vegas, San Antonio and Nashville. It also has an outlet in Sacramento and Toronto. All share a focus on fashion and the visual arts, but their curricula are only quasi-uniform and resemblances between them are decidedly fraternal – or at best inexact. Toronto, for example, has a film school; Las Vegas has a program in IT; Detroit does Game Design: the differences are subtle but distinct.
IADT is a subsidiary of the Career Education Corporation, which announced in June 2007 that it would close its Pittsburgh campus in December of 2008.
Points of Distinction
Areas of Study
IADT is certified to grant Bachelor’s and Associate’s degrees in a wide range of academic subjects, but these can differ from location to location. Be sure to check the programs for the campus nearest you. Most of the programs offered fall under the broad categories of communications, design, and information technology. In 2007, IADT launched an Internet “campus” where the bulk of its courses can be taken online.
IADT Admissions
Open and ongoing. In most cases, a telephone interview, a high school diploma and a “willingness to learn” are the modest prerequisites.
IADT Faculty
Business professionals, whose paramount teaching credential is the experience they’ve amassed doing day-to-day work in their fields, make up the bulk of the IADT faculty. At the flagship Tampa campus, where up-to-date data are available, the student-faculty ratio was about 16:1 in late 2006.
Student Body
IADT’s students are difficult to pigeonhole, but only about a third of the approximately 10,000 enrollees in a recent census were men. All of them commute and many work full-time, attending courses online, or in the evenings or on weekends.
Student life
Most of IADT’s curriculum is career-oriented and aimed at working or married professionals, and student life is circumscribed and limited, consisting chiefly of classroom encounters.
(Note: Not all programs are necessarily available at all locations.)
Arts Crafts and Leisure
Communication
Communications
Computer Networking
Fashion Design
Graphic Design
Information Technology
Interior Design
Management and Administration
Marketing
Multimedia and Web Design
Photography and photo journalism
Visual Arts
e-Business/ e-Commerce
(Note: Not all degrees and coursework are necessarily available for all programs of study.)
Degrees or Coursework
California
Florida
Illinois
Michigan
Nevada
Tennessee
Texas
Washington
Information is not guaranteed to be correct. Please check with individual schools for the most accurate and recent information.
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