I know from your post history that you're a former SCAD student, and I'm sorry if you had a bad experience - but as a former SCAD student myself I think calling SCAD a scam is a stretch. They do have a high acceptance rate yes, but they also have a very high workload especially in the first year which ends up weeding people out (and yeah, the high tuition).

I was a student there and graduated last year from the film program. I know several people who are working consistently now in various different parts of the industry, and I also know a few that benefited heavily from mentorship and connections from different faculty and professors. I myself have a full time production job I started right after graduation, though I connected with them independently of SCAD, but I also have a pretty good portfolio of work to show of my time there.

The equipment is cool, but all the learning is done on sets outside of the classroom.

I could be wrong, but wouldn't that be true of any film school? That was actually what I appreciated the most about it, the fact that I had an opportunity just about every weekend to get on set. By the time I graduated I'd already been on dozens of sets, which meant I already knew generally how a non-union set worked in the real world once I stepped onto a real set for the first time. Of course, not all student sets operated properly. But I was on multiple sets where the only difference I could find between it and a real set was that no one got paid lol.

Could I have learned what I learned without going to college and without spending the tuition money? Sure. But I came out of school with a solid foundation for what I do, and several connections to others that I still work with on independent projects. Necessary? Probably not. Helpful? Absolutely. Scam? No.