American Jeweler’s Institute

This course changed my entire life! I graduated in 2001 and I am sending my now 20 year old son through this program. My work has been in British Vogue, GQ, Glamour, Tatler, Traveller, Brides, Square Mile and more. My work was written about on on the front page of the Vogue Italy website and I am constantly contacted by press. I have been to Paris and have many more exciting things coming up this year. Jim believed in me encouraged me and taught me the skills I needed to become great! I have never taken another course and I am a very successful jeweler, artist and designer! It was worth so much more then it cost. It has given me the life I always dreamed of! I work from my home studio. I get to be with my kids anytime I want. I have been to Hawaii 4 times this past year all from the jewelry making I learned from American Jewelers Institute! I have supported my family on my own with this wonderful career and am very very happy! The best decision of my life! I loved the one on one attention I would get and I learned at the pace that was right for me. Jim was very good at teaching me and I look forward to seeing what becomes of my son when he completes the program! Thank you Jim! Angeline owner

Absolutely not worth it! I came to this school in August of 2014 and left by September. The owner/​teacher has never been a jeweler and has only been taught to teach it. He is also planning his retirement and it shows in his total lack of enthusiasm for teaching or even caring about basic safety practices. Not only are the communal shop tools old and outdated, they are severely neglected to the point where they are becoming dangerous to use. The benches also left much to be desired, if not a total overhaul to be functional. The owner is also a tool salesman and the tool package advertised is severely marked up from actual retail prices. There have been students after me that were charged the same prices I was but received much lower quality tools. Since leaving here I have found another school in the same area, The Portland Jewelry Academy, and have come to realize that most things I had learned previously were wrong. From basic practices like sawing and filing to how my bench was set up all needed to be relearned. The owner/​teacher at the Portland Jewelry Academy has been an active jeweler for the last 20 years in the Portland area and has a fantastic reputation within the jewelry community unlike the owner/​teacher of this school.
TL; DR– do not go here. you will not get what you pay for. Portland Jewelery Academy is where it’s at.

I would not recommend this school. I attended in 2013, and for two of the four months I was taught by the owner, Jim Clark. The instruction was not what I had expected, and I mainly worked on my own with not a lot of direction or feedback from Jim. He would give me an overview of what to do, and check in with me every few days to see how it was going. Luckily I had some background in jewelry making and after a few weeks of his hands off approach to teaching, I started to ask lots of questions and pushed for more information. But there were some pretty basic things that I couldn’t get answers for. An example: When rolling silver ingots into sheet, I was getting lots of feathering cracks on the edges, even though I was annealing often. Jim even observed my annealing technique and couldn’t tell me why this was happening. I spent days trying to correct this, only to find out (from a book I had at home) that I was overheating the silver. When I told Jim what I had discovered, he informed me he had never heard that could happen. He didn’t teach me several things that were on the first half of the curriculum but graded me on them anyway, important stuff like sizing and re-​tipping. He said I didn’t need to know how to do these things because I was planning to work on my own.
Over time he expressed that he had wanted to retire some time ago but couldn’t. Maybe this accounts for what I felt was a lack of investment in the school and teaching. He explained that he bought the school with no experience in jewelry making. He was taught by a former teacher.
After my first two month, he brought in another teacher, Jason Chandler. That made a huge difference. Jason was so knowledgable and really excited to be teaching. I learned so much from him. But he left the school after a year and Jim is now teaching again. I rented space for a year after I graduated. The place is a bit of a mess. The tools and equipment are very old which would be fine, but they don’t seem to be maintained very well.
One thing that I find upsetting is that Jim really talks up his «job placement» record. When I was renting studio space for a year and can honestly say that there was very little help with job placement for many graduates who I know personally.
I also took a 3D CAD class here and if it weren’t for an 8 hour online tutorial I did, I would not be able to use the 3D software. I know several other people who took this class and have not been able to work in CAD design.
I’m sorry to say that I don’t think this is a good program. The tool package that you pay for as part of the program has a very high mark-​up and Jim has recently begun purchasing low budget, poorer tools and still charging high prices for them. In the past year I saw many student leave the program after 2 – 4 weeks and get refunds because they were not happy with the education they received. Maybe there was a time when this was a great school, but that time seems to have passed.