The end of an era is fast approaching. Madison Media Institute, the for-profit college that spent almost five decades training thousands of students for jobs in the music, film and video game industry, is closing its doors forever. Thus dies the dream of Ray Szmanda, the ubiquitous former Menards spokesman who founded MMI (then called the Trans American School of Broadcasting) in 1969. Szmanda died earlier this year.
Mike Bailey, MMI’s current president and academic dean, is terse when he explains in a statement that MMI’s closure, expected by year’s end, is “a business decision.” He declined to comment further for Isthmus.
The reasons for the closing likely have to do with increased competition from technical colleges, sweeping industry changes, and shifts in federal requirements for for-profits like MMI that require students’ starting employment salaries be within a certain range of the amount of student debt they’ve accrued. Two years ago, a student successfully demanded reimbursement for his MMI tuition after the school dropped some of its program offerings halfway through his first year. Federal data shows that a disproportionate amount of students are dropping out of for-profit schools like MMI with massive amounts of student debt — more than 900,000 in 2015-16.
“The school was always a missed opportunity,” says Brian Liston, who served as its director of programs and curriculum from 2001-2003 and set up its accreditation. “It was good, but it had the chance to be great.”
Liston notes that efforts to diversify — the school considered adding programs in nursing and business — never really got off the ground. And while MMI did okay placing students in video production and video game development, the placement numbers in music recording, one of the school’s most popular programs, always lagged behind national averages.
“The very framework they operated under was to train people for jobs that existed in the 1970s,” says Liston.
Industry and regulation shifts may have left MMI in the dust, but its history remains rich. Eclectic Madison musician Biff Blumfumgagnge is a grad. Other grads have landed gigs at places like the Crystal Grand Music Theatre in Lake Delton and the Tribune Company in Chicago.
Dee “Biatch” Biznatch, who provides banter (and copious dick jokes) as part of the morning show on Madison’s 94.1 WJJO-FM, was a teenager when she attended MMI in the 1990s. She remembers a raucous atmosphere that included pre-test study sessions with MMI instructors at a nearby pub.
She also recalls a huge group of students trying to learn sound editing using a reel-to-reel (!) tape of the same song: The Four Seasons’ cheese-a-iffic “December, 1963 (Oh What A Night).”
“All up and down the hallway, you’d hear parts of the song, then a huge WHIRRRR! as we all tried to find the part we wanted to cut and edit,” she says.
The networking was what ended up mattering most. Biznatch connected with Glen Gardner, then general manager of what is now Midwest Family Broadcasting. The rest is local radio history.
“I learned a lot about where the music industry was going,” she says of her time at MMI. “The biggest thing I remember is an instructor telling us, “Don’t think you’re not replaceable. Anyone is replaceable.” (Now there’s some industry prescience.)
It wasn’t all just fun and games. Justin Kibbel, who attended MMI from 2003-2005, used the digital arts and animation training he received there to eventually break in with Frank Productions (now FPC Live) and land his current gig as the marketing manager for the soon-to-open Sylvee music venue.
“The class sizes were small, and you could collaborate with people,” Kibbel says. “And MMI definitely helped with networking.”
