Let's Play "The Design Apprentice"

Season 3 of The Apprentice poses the question "do you need a college degree to work for Donald Trump?" as it pits a team of college grads against a team of business folks with only a high school diploma. If the teams were composed of print graphic designers - one group with design-related degrees only a year or two out of school and the other self-described designers who are completely self-trained freelancers or have a few years of on-the-job desktop publishing or prepress training - and all the tasks were related to creating ads, brochures, logos, and newsletters, which team would win the challenges each week? -->

Each side has certain advantages and disadvantages and it really isn't possible to predict on education alone how good a designer someone might be. But we can certainly have fun speculating about The Design Apprentice as we ask "do I need a degree to do desktop publishing and graphic design?".

Agree or Disagree? The degreed designers are likely to have a much more solid foundation in the elements and principles of graphic design and design theory but will they have enough hands-on, real world experience with Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress to get their designs translated into print?

Agree or Disagree? The self-trained designers may be wizards with software, but can they analyze the image and marketing needs of a business and develop a unique identity system and a print campaign that's beyond run of the mill or cookie-cutter templates?

Which team would you be on? What are the specific skills that you would bring to your team? What would be your weaknesses?