“I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the FSU Film School’s support,” says Eduardo Rodriguez, on the set of his $18,000 student film, Daughter.

Film school personnel have a habit of boasting about the perks their institutions offer to students. Most of them will also provide a convincing argument that their gorgeous facilities, ingenious faculty and vital artistic community is the greatest perk of all. Of course some of this is, at the end of the day, of little consequence to you. What you want to know is simply where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck, the best chance of wowing a festival jury and who exactly will pay to process all those precious feet of film you plan to shoot. While there’s no guarantee that any package of benefits will make your film school choice a slamdunk, the following list may help you narrow down what “perks” are most important to you.

North Carolina School of the Arts, located in Winston-Salem, NC, has an under­graduate program in moviemaking. Like most film schools, they pride themselves on their talented faculty and diverse student body. In addition, the school offers its film students perhaps the biggest perk of all: money.

“Our students are given a total equipment package,” says Dale Pollock, Dean of the School of Filmmaking. The package includes film or tape stock, processing and a cash budget for all the films students make in their final three years in the program. “We are the only undergraduate program to supply all equipment and a cash budget for every production,” he adds.

According to Pollock, the school's contribution helps to create “a conservatory atmosphere in which students can focus on their art form and get hands-on experience shooting digital in their very first term.”

Christopher Lockey, a 2003 graduate, received a $5,000 cash budget to shoot his final film, with the school covering all additional costs, as well. The 20-minute film, shot on 16mm, edited digitally and output back to film, would have been far too expensive for Lockey to make without the school's help.

“We [were able to] concentrate on learning how to do it right,” Lockey says of his training as a writer-director, “not just on getting the means to do it in the first place.”

Similarly, Florida's Full Sail Real World Education, which has a 13-month film degree program, pays for students' moviemaking expenses.

“The school is an all-inclusive program,” says David Franko, program director at Full Sail. “This would include insurance, permits, processing, materials for sets, books, film stock and all the equipment.” In addition, Full Sail allows graduates to return to the school to audit classes for free whenever the school acquires new equipment. With almost daily technological advancements in film, the value of this perk seems particularly high.

But money is not all film schools offer. In fact, many exploit their location in unique ways, or find interesting ways to help students gain valuable work experience outside a normal classroom setting.

The University of Utah-Salt Lake City's film studies department offers students class credit to attend the Sundance Film Festival—and write a critical analysis of nine films.

California's Chapman University offers its students a chance to study abroad in France while completing an internship program at the Cannes Film Festival. In addition to basic intern duties at the festival, students take classes in everything from French cooking to soccer.

Students pursuing an MBA in Media Management at Metropolitan College of New York are required to study abroad with a two-week trip to Cannes. Unlike Chapman, though, Metropolitan's program is an introduction to the business side of the festival and the industry itself.

Northwestern University film students can take advantage of Studio 22 Productions, a non-profit, student-run production company that helps students complete their own projects. The group gets funding from the school and individual donors, and gives major and minor grants to several student productions each year.

Rockport College, in Rockport, Maine is also the site of the International Film & Television Workshops, one of the country's most respected film programs. Rockport students have access to employment at the Workshops each summer, where they are able to gain experience of their own while working alongside the industry faculty that comes to the school each summer to teach.

During spring break, film students at the University of New Orleans stay at school to work on their Spring Film. This additional annual project is a major production—anything from a music video to a feature film—with a full crew of film students, actors and even alumni and professors.

Florida State University, which has both graduate and undergraduate film students, sees more than 170 new student films each year between their two programs. The school sends many of them out to film festivals, and pays all related costs. That includes the cost of prints, shipping and entrance fees. According to Dr. Raymond Fielding, Dean of the Film School, FSU sent out 29 student films in 2002 to be screened at 87 different festivals. The school, which also pays all production costs for student films in addition to festival expenses, claims any prizes won by student films to finance future festival expenses.

“How did it help me?” recent FSU graduate Eduardo Rodriguez asks of the financial support he received for his film. “It's very simple: I wouldn't be where I am right now without the FSU Film School's support.” The production costs for Rodriguez' thesis film, Daughter, which came to $18,000, were paid entirely by FSU. It was then promoted by the school at more than 30 international festivals and went on to win several awards—most notably a nomination for the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

Daughter raised eyebrows again at FSU's annual screening for the Director's Guild of America in Los Angeles, and a copy of the film wound up in the hands of Bob Weinstein. Weinstein promptly signed the young director to a contract, and he's now hard at work with veteran writer-director Robert Rodriguez on the script for Curandero, the first of three films Eduardo will direct for Weinstein's Dimension Films.

The FSU faculty chooses which films will be submitted to festivals on behalf of the school. Students who wish to submit a film independently need to obtain permission from the school as well as pay their own expenses.

“The school also operates its own Internet server,” states Fielding. About 50 of its recent films are screened continuously and upon demand.” FSU distributes some films through Atomfilms and Hypnotic.

The school's financial support for production and festival expenses, says Rodriguez, encourages students to make better films. “Not having to pay for your films frees your mind from the concerns and tribulations that come when you spend your own money on a project. If you make a movie and you put in your last $25, your vision tends to focus on the fact that you need to make those $25 back.”

The school offers students the ability to make ambitious, professional films without going deeply into debt to do so. Ideally, says Rodriguez, this will eventually encourage young people from low and middle-income families to pursue moviemaking careers.

These schools all accomplish a similar goal: helping students understand the complexities of the film industry. Whether a school can spend thousands of dollars to promote a talented student or none at all to get them onto a professional set, the experience—as any moviemaker will tell you—is what really matters.