Design schools are reporting a near-record surge in applications, requiring deans and faculty to reexamine how to prepare a new generation of designers to enter a field that may not need -- indeed, may not even want -- them.

The question of how to train aspiring fashion designers is in no way new: Design schools have built their reputations on particular approaches to education, from a freethinking, conceptually based curriculum (as with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) to a technically focused one that underscores marketability (the Academy of Art University and Parsons The New School for Design, among others). But with jobs rapidly disappearing for industry veterans — let alone freshly minted graduates — and stores glutted with clothes, both art- and commerce-centered programs are scrambling to reevaluate themselves.

Take, for instance, Walter Van Beirendonck, the director of fashion at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts, a school noted for promoting an experimental and intellectual design aesthetic. "I have started to add [in the graduate program] several new topics to create a more fluent step into the fashion world," he says. Those "new topics" include workshops in networking and business development with professionals Van Beirendonck has recruited, including graduates like Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester, as well as milliner Stephen Jones, set designer Bob Verhelst and stylist Olivier Rizzo. Van Beirendonck says that these workshops have been prompted by the specter of fewer jobs and start-up funds available to students, but insists the school's overall approach to teaching will not change.