Let's be honest (and cruel) here - they aren't. I have little respect for game design schools, they seem to be all about teaching people how to "think inside the box - i.e., latest design trends = what you should do - and teach them a bit of everything, but nothing in-depth. I have friends that graduated in game design here in São Paulo and regret it deeply. Maybe in gringoland they are better, I don't know.
Not really, at least in my experience. Back in 2003, I was laid off from my programming job and moved back in with my parents for a while. I had always wanted to make games and had gone way off track, so I thought that I would give it an honest effort, and a dedicated game school seemed like it might provide a way in (they didn't really exist back when I finished high school). I don't regret getting into that program, but I do regret waiting until the 2nd (4-month) semester to drop it.
They do teach some useful things there. The quality of the instruction varies tremendously. The instructor of my class on Photoshop was fantastic and he had worked for a few different visual effects studios in the TV and film industries. The guy who taught the introductory 3D modeling class was doing it to supplement his regular job of digging graves (I'm not kidding). The guy who taught the first of the courses on "Game Design" was a 20 year old guy who had been in the right place at the right time on a temp QA job and was recruited for design work on some obscure games that I can no longer remember what they were.
One of the key elements of the program was that in the 2nd year, students would form development teams across the separate design, art, and programming tracks to create their own games over an 8 month period (each team being guided by an instructor), using the Unreal Tournament engine. Unfortunately, that got axed by the new owners of the school (The Art Institutes) just after I finished my 1st semester there.
The way I see it, for the price that students have to pay to attend these schools, there should be a significantly higher percentage of students actually getting jobs in the industry. These schools are presented as vocational training, yet I would guess that no more than 10-15% of the people who were in some stage of one of the game development tracks when I was there managed to establish a career in the games industry. Given that they are typically far more expensive than getting a college or university degree, there is no way that I would recommend a game design school to anybody.
I didn't learn anything useful regarding game design in the nearly 8 months that I was there. There was a class which covered art history, color theory, and the like which was actually useful. The Photoshop class was very useful, as was the 3D modeling class (even if the instructor wasn't a professional). The class on presentation and public speaking was also useful. There was also a class on visual storytelling that examined games, movies, TV, cartoons, etc but without the bullshit lens of postmodernism or critical theory.
At the time that I was enrolled in that game design program, I also worked on what ended up being the bulk of my contribution to world building for Ultima V: Lazarus. Ian was working hard to get that pre-alpha demo done so that he could release it (and demo it personally for Richard Garriott), so I often found myself working on that instead of doing my homework. I learned way more about making games from contributing to Lazarus than I did from a game design school.
TL;DR: If you want to learn to make games, make your own mod or join a team in building an extensive mod instead of paying $$$$ to a game design school.
Bringing this back to the topic of this thread: I already mentioned that I was 29 at the time. There were about ten of us who started together in that game design class. Two of them were 18 and fresh out of high school (one of them got hired by Rockstar the same day I did and he's still there). Most of them were around 22. We had one class that got into the history of video and computer games, and it became very clear at that point who really had a sense of the history of the industry (me and the instructor) and who didn't (everyone else). At least they were trying to teach about the history of the industry. In various classes, I seemed to keep coming up with examples from games that none of the other students had played (Deus Ex) or even heard of (Ultima VII).
K!@!
