Forbes takes a hard look at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. The privately owned for-profit art school "will accept anyone who has a high school diploma and is willing to pay the $22,000 annual tuition (excluding room and board), no art portfolio required," reports Forbes.

Just 32% percent graduate in six years, and while the school touts placing students at such companies as Apple and Pixar--and several illustrious alumni are listed on the school's Wikipedia page--Katia Savchuk writes that students are just as likely to leave with a mountain of debt and a future at Starbucks.

Savchuk continues: "[Elisa] Stephens has plenty to celebrate. Under her watch enrollment has skyrocketed from 2,200 to 16,000, generating an estimated $300 million in annual revenues, heavily subsidized by federal student loans. The Stephens family has turned that pile of art-school tuition into one of the largest real estate empires in San Francisco...worth an estimated $420 million, net of debt, and the family pulls in tens of millions of dollars each year leasing these buildings back to the Academy of Art for classrooms and dorms.

Thanks to the university’s financial success, Stephens, her younger brother, Scott, and her parents, Richard and Susanne, are worth an estimated $800 million."

The school’s accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, has been scrutinizing AAU, largely for its low graduation rates, according to Forbes.