Hi,

The following may 'sound' pretty negative, but I'm not the only one
with this view, and some people seam afraid to say their thoughts in
this 'small' audio world...
I can't stand not letting the 'world', and in particular, the very
motivated candidates for audio courses, know, how bad the ratio
quality/investment is when you participate to an SAE Audio engineer
program. It costs some 7500 EUR, lasts 1 1/2 year + 3 months of
meaningless obliged course about 'the personal computer', called Media
Certificate... The last one is maybe OK for my grand parents, with all
my respect for them, but they would/could never pay some 1200 EUR for
that 3 months lasting course, given by the way by people, who are all
the time corrected (!!!) by students, who know much more about the
subject...
If you have experience or not, studied similar things or not, you have
to follow this stupid introduction course.
After three months and a pro forma 'exam', you get a hard paper what
they call a 'diplom'. Ofcourse, it is not recognised as such by no
state, by no company as well, I presume.
Then, you think, after three months of worthless investment of time
and money, end being treaten as childs (!!! they laugh of you and get
very angry when you come a bit too late, after you escaped as soon as
possible from your 'serious' work...), well, here comes the serious
thing! DDDJJEEZZEESS KRISTE, It became only worse. Very demotivated
guy gives, again, introduction to PC's, now for the audio audience
only (before where video students present), and this is a mike, and
that is a cinch connector... Even my children (4 and 5 year old) know
this... by way of speaking. Then, courses about electronics, level
secundary school, 2nd or 3rd year... I gave up. Ofcourse you have to
pay, not till you die, but till the end of the semester... I see it
this way: I saved almost 4000 EUR. With that money, I can buy me some
nice hard- and software... Or get private lessons at any professional
studio. If you calculate the cost for 1 lesson at SAE, that comes up
to 50 EUR, that's 100 EUR a week...
OK, I want to pay that, but only if I get professional quality, not
some idiot teaching from frustrated guys, never succeeded in doing
nice studio or stage jobs?
A small word about the infrastructure, maybe? All software based
training and practices happen on Apple Macintosh. I thought, as a
Windows XP user, that now I would see the big difference betwwen both
systems, Mac known as THE system for creative purposes... I can assure
you, in ALL courses we lost I think as an average 25% of our time (&
money...) because systems failed... Same thing when we had to do the
obliged exercices, after the courses, during our 'spare time' (if
any...). Some people almost became crazy; only after repeated messages
to the direction, the staf came to investigate waht the problem was...
My advice: think 7 times before you subscribe at SAE, don't let you
influence by the nice practice studio's, in which you eventually work
maybe 5% of your total time at SAE...
I'm prepared to answer any question in this context, hoping that or
candidates can be helped, or, who knows, SAE starts thinking about
they way of getting easy money...

Yours sincerely,
Bernard.