Opportunities for college students of art and design to study fundamentals of visual aesthetics, integrity of form, and principles of composition are limited today by a number of factors. With the well-documented prominence of postmodern critical theory in the world of contemporary art, the study of aesthetic fundamentals is largely subordinated to a multitude of conceptual, theoretical, and expressive priorities recycled from the art world. Contemporary idea-based priorities tend to obviate, in the minds of many artists who teach, the "need" for aesthetic fundamentals in college art curricula. As Rudolph Arnheim suggests, however, art is not easily replaced by ideas alone. For no matter how interested artists, instructors, or students may be in ideas, theory, or self-expression, today's college art/design students need to gain a solid grounding in aesthetic fundamentals early in their college art educations in order to become adept and well-informed makers of art and/or design. In this essay the author argues for the value of aesthetic fundamentals in the education of artists and designers, and outlines a series of factors that contribute to the subordination of aesthetics in college art instruction. He examines introductory-level college art/design curricula, including a pair of courses that are intended to provide students with visual, compositional, and/or aesthetic fundamentals, and explores why instructors, even in these courses, too often bypass such fundamentals in their teaching. Specifically, he discusses the ways in which traditions of art education, mixed with artist/teachers' own art training, lead to a virtual dismissal of aesthetic fundamentals. Certain assumptions that professional artists often bring to their teaching and how these contribute to the problem are examined. He identifies a historical phenomenon that plays a key role in the subordination of aesthetic fundamentals--the schism between "art" and "design." The author suggests an approach for embracing aesthetic fundamentals in college art instruction that preserves students' individual and cultural differences, while at the same time enabling them to make aesthetic decisions in their work, and to discern aesthetic quality in each other's work. Finally, he concludes that students can fully succeed in more advanced explorations of the complex and controversial realm of contemporary art issues, and certainly in the applied arts, only after receiving a solid, balanced, and inclusive grounding in the profound aesthetic power of clear organizing principles of visual information. (Contains 32 notes.)