Well a couple of weeks ago I graduated from Cityvarsity in Cape Town with a Advanced diplama in animation and new media. It has a fancy title, whoo-hoo, before I elaborate further, I'd like to give a bit of background on the whole situation. 

The way the course work is after 2 years you allready graduate with a diploma in animation, this deploma basically covers all stopmotion and 2D animation. You then have the option to do an additional year, learning Maya and compositing stuff. I was told " definately do this extra year, your salary increases exponentially!!" wow, what total bs. 

No denying that extra year did teach me alot, and I had time to teach myself alot, in that respect it was worth it, but looking at the situation that most graduate animators find themselves in at the moment, I'm really surprised that nobody has voiced their consern or opinions as of yet on the fact that, here are all these new graduates, that have no jobs and can't find any, just look at the status updates of most of the animators on this site, "Graduate looking for job", "Freelance work needed", " will work for penuts" exc.

Then I see this article on the main site "The Cape Film Commission and partners are creating a world class
animation academy that will create 10 000 new jobs for young PDI's in
animation by 2020",OK so how does this help anybody that is currently looking for a job? How is training more people, creating more jobs? 

Anyway so the point is after 3 years of studying, some of the people that graduated with the advanced diploma, went to look for jobs at the same places, that the people that graduated after 2 years with the normal animation diploma went to, I mean doesn't that kinda defeat the point of having to do a extra year if you're gonna go work for the same company your classmate found a job at after only studying for 2 years, what the situation basically is then, you payed for a extra year of studies and ended up working under your classmate that knows less than you, how messed up is that.

I certainly can complain alot for someone that found a job at his dream company, it just seems like someone has to say something about all the graduates that don't find jobs and end up leaving the country to go work as farm hands in the US or UK or whatever.