ID students at the Savannah College of Art and Design

September is here, and you know what that means—the start of National Honey Month, yes, but also the reluctant acceptance by most students (and professors) that summer is really over and school is really underway for another semester. Here at Core77, we thought we'd use this back-to-school season to assess the state of design education—or, even better, to ask design educators to assess it for us.

Over the summer, we reached out to the chairs of ten top American industrial design programs and asked them each several questions about how ID education is evolving and how their programs are keeping up with the changes. Our questions were as follows:

How different is industrial design education today than it was ten years ago? Will it look very different ten years from now?

What would you say to a prospective student who worries about the relevance of an ID education in an increasingly digital world?

What sets your ID program apart from those at other schools?

What's the job market like for recent graduates of your program? Is now a good time to embark on an ID career?

If you had to give just one piece of advice to an incoming student in your program, what would it be?

Our first answers come from Wayne Chung at Carnegie Mellon University, and we'll be posting a new interview each weekday, with participants from Art Center College of Design, California College of the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Georgia Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, Savannah College of Art and Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of Visual Arts and the University of Cincinnati.

These educators' answers should be relevant not only to current and prospective students but to anyone interested in the changing face of the industrial design profession. We hope that's everyone reading this—and we hope that you'll weigh in with your thoughts in the comments.

Update: Due to popular request, we have added the University of Cincinnati to the above list, for 11 total interviews. And for those asking about RIT, its ID chair is participating in a different education-related story to be posted next week.