I was interested to hear about the surprisingly robust approach taken by the French when training their new VFX talent…
“[our] French counterparts [who run university VFX degrees, teach on] courses four or five years long, and cull students from the course who don’t meet the quality expected.” (Tom Box, interviewed in the latest edition of 3D World magazine)
In the UK it’s overwhelmingly a three-year degree. Although there tend to be a lot of first-year drop-outs, the duffers who remain on the course after that tend to be tolerated right through to graduation. They’re too often graduated as well, at management insistence, if only with a 3rd class degree. In France, it seems, the teachers have more control and thus a degree course’s reputation trumps the income from a student’s fees / the university’s student retention-rate statistics.