It depends on what kind of work you will have to do on your Art School.

A friend of mine studied at an Art School and had to work mainly with Photoshop and Illustrator. He had to learn a bit of 3D modelling but it was not much (he didn't need a dedicated graphics card).
He bought a Macbook Air and was very happy with it.

The OS can be very user friendly and all Adobe products are available for it.
Hardware-wise its lightweight and aluminum body are top notch. Its specs may not be the highest but were enough for him.

@Serapth
You are right about Apple's recent bad moves (I will not get into the ridiculous patent matter).
Just explaining what you have cited: (not defending Apple in anyway here)

Their recent moves of making decisions for me (removing Java, trying to kill Flash, the removal of X11), their arbitrary removal of apps on vaguely defined moral grounds are anathema to how I view computing.

1) Java was removed from the standard distribution because they found many flaws on it. Some malware applications were using java to download themselves to the user's computer. But I think the main problem here was the old Safari configuration that allowed java applications to run automatically.
2) Not installing Flash on their iOS devices was a very clear choice of Apple. They raised a very high standard on how applications should run on iOS and what their performance should be. Flash is still very heavy on the processor and Apple stated that they are waiting a reply from Adobe on changes that make Flash faster.
3) I don't know why they removed X11. This is very weird.

Still, Java and X11 (now XQuartz) can be easily installed on OS X.

It's not really powerful enough for media work. Lightroom/Aperture already sort of drag, let alone the big boys like Premiere/FCP. It's also not light enough to be really very much fun to carry around, though it's not awful with a backpack.

I pretty much disagree with this. I got one just recently (and it's the only thing I've been talking about here lately...) but I use After Effects pretty much every day on 1920x1080 videos and I'm extremely happy with the way it works. Obviously something that renders at full resolution with huge numbers of effects in real time would be perfect but the Macbook keeps up with me quite nicely. Speedgrade typically works in real time for what I use it for too (which typically isn't profoundly complicated). The retina screen also makes these things go a lot more smoothly. I don't use Premiere as often but I would be surprised if it were slower than those other two. As for portability I barely notice if it's in my backpack and in fact I find myself checking often to make sure it's still there.

Regarding the OP though, I'm not sure it's what you want. If you want to do lots of high-end 3D game development (/playing) you'll probably be better off with a higher end or at least more specialized laptop or desktop, and on the other hand for use in classes you probably need something lighter. Also probably less expensive, particularly if there's a chance you might lose it or have it stolen. The Macbook Pro seems like a very nice "all-around" kind of computer, and if it has exactly what you want, get it, but if you think the hardware isn't quite what you want/need you probably are better off getting something targeted toward your needs.