That being said, there is very little that you could learn in a school that you can’t learn on your own. The best you can do in school is to learn about the great artists of the past and their methods and get some idea of what motivated them. It is absolutely impossible to learn to be an artist in a school. Can’t happen. You can get access to various materials that you otherwise wouldn’t, like lithograph stones and such, but the tools do not make the artist. If you think, “Well I’m not a good artist now but I could be if I went to school” then you’re doomed from the start. Americans are particularly prone to an unreasonable belief that in order to even approach something someone must take a course about it or go to school for it. Perhaps that’s true of engineering and medicine but not of art. If education was to function in all cases to help open doorways then it would be useful but in most cases it does not. This is not so much the failure of the education system as it is of the student not understanding how to learn in the first place.

I never hire art school graduates because most of the time their "education" gets in the way of their creativity and ingenuity. I would much rather hire someone who taught themselves how to draw by copying others artwork and then developing their own style. Most of the really good anime artists did not go to art school.