The Top Fifty MFA Programs in the United States: A Comprehensive Guide

P.S. I should say, too, that the poll I mentioned above is just one of many. Another poll (of 371 applicants, where applicants could pick more than one first choice), showed that 57% of applicants have as their top "aim" getting funded "time to write," 42% say employability (i.e. the degree itself), 36% say mentoring (which causes them to primarily consider program size, as program size helps determine student-to-faculty ratio), 34% say "community" (which again causes applicants to consider program size, though it pushes many of these applicants to consider larger programs, i.e. larger communities), 19% say "the credential" (again, as represented by the degree itself, though this also pushes such applicants to favor shorter programs, with a lower time-to-degree), and much smaller percentages said that they wanted an MFA to validate themselves as writers or to avoid full-time employment (very similar to wanting "time to write," per the above, just as "validation" is intimately related to "mentoring" and "the credential"). Again, these polls were not intended to be exhaustive, though it's noteworthy that 0% of poll respondents chose "none of the above."

Hi Clairels,

I'd respond to your comment, but honestly I have absolutely no idea what you mean to imply or what your concern is. I attended both those programs (J.D., 2001; M.F.A. 2009), and certainly don't regret either experience.

Take care,
S.

To be fair, Seth, I think it's important to point out that Iowa was the _only_ MFA program in 1936. So of course it was regarded as the top program then--among one. (Not arguing about anything else, promise; the way that fact was dropped just seemed potentially misleading.)

How exactly were the "selective rates" for each school determined on this list?

Hi JTL,

Per my contract with P&W (as I'm sure you can understand) most of the MFA data has been temporarily removed from my website under a non-compete clause (which I find wholly reasonable). It'll go back up on the site at the end of February 2010. In the meantime, if you have a specific question about data not available from P&W, e-mail me and I'll do my best to answer your question. Best wishes,

Be well,

Seth

Hi Phoebe,

I've addressed our miscommunication elsewhere (i.e. we're dialoging elsewhere), so I won't get into much more detail here. To this point (and accepting that one day this may change), Iowa has shown that it is popularly considered the top program no matter how many competitors it has: 141 full-res competitors, as now, or only a handful, as it had in the 1950s. As to the period between 1936 and (say) 1950, a) Iowa obviously must get credit for originating the idea of the graduate creative writing program (as this both indicates it would have been regarded as the top program even if had had competition, but also indicates that even in the absence of competition Iowa does get credit for being the "top" program both because it empirically was and because it deserved to be for having thought of an idea others did not), and b) the more than a half-century since 1950 shows that Iowa's reputation is unaffected by how much or how little competition it has. So to the extent you're suggesting Iowa was only the top program from (say) 1936 to 1950 because it was the only program--which bare fact itself is true--I think that's actually more potentially misleading than anything I wrote, as we have ample evidence to suggest something inherent in the Iowa model (and the mere fact that the originator of an idea has a special cache as to that idea for many years afterward) would have made Iowa #1 from 1936 to 1950 no matter what. So I don't agree with you that Iowa's reputation from 1936 to 1950 is "meaningless."

Be well,

Seth

Hi SSTG,

This was one of several philosophical dilemmas the rankings were forced to confront over the past three years (others of which I will be writing on in more detail in the near future, in response to several queries about the rankings' methodology). Specifically, the question of how to collect data presented, among many others, several issues relevant to your comment/query: 1) Even when the AWP, the organization that officially represents MFA programs nationally, has asked programs for data (e.g. in 2007), only around 50% have decided to reply (and for some crucial, highly-specific queries, only 35% have agreed to provide responses); 2) Consequently, any direct request made to the programs by a freelance journalist would, we can safely assume, a) be met with silence at a rate much greater than 50% (as P&W does not have as much of a direct claim on MFA programs' administrative compliance, understandably, as AWP does), and b) privilege especially those programs that responded to the said journalist's request, when in fact the programs' private "responses" would do nothing to make this information directly and transparently available to applicants on a daily basis--the purpose of all educational rankings being, ultimately, to achieve just this sort of transparency of vital data for those most in need of it. In other words, to any program (and this is by no means directed particularly at you, SSTG) that says it would/would have volunteer(ed) such information if asked, I respond: 1) Did you provide this information to (as it were) your "parent" organization when it was requested of you in 2007?; 2) Do you regularly provide this information to applicants when they request it by phone, mail, e-mail, or in person?; 3) If you have this information and are willing to part with it, why does it not appear anywhere on your program website, whose content you control absolutely and in real-time, and whose fundamental premise is to answer those questions most central to your applicant constituency (among whom, you surely know, funding and selectivity perhaps rank one and two as items of interest)?

As indicated in the methodology article, the rankings were intended to privilege transparency--thus, program data that had been made transparently available was privileged both for ranking purposes and for long-term data-collection purposes. Consequently, funding and admissions data was compiled via a number of sources, including (variously) direct interviews with current applicants who had been successful in gathering this data upon request, data provided in widely-disseminated letters of acceptance or rejection provided by programs to applicants, individual program websites, (in some instances) data provided directly by the programs to researchers (if that program represented that it was in the process of adding such information to its website and subsequently did so), public statements of MFA faculty members or administrators on high-traffic MFA-applicant blogs/communities or major media outlets, and so on. In other words, programs that made an effort to disseminate the information publicly and widely were acknowledged as having done so via the many methods available for such transmission -- with program websites being the most common of these -- instead of an individual researcher making a private phone call and getting told intimate program data on a case-by-case basis only.

Whereas many instances of research and ranking are philosophy-neutral, this ranking was--transparently, and this has been the case since January of 2007 (when the research effort started)--philosophy-inflected. It might appeal to my own ego to know that programs are personally willing to part with information if I (and only I) ask for it, but that does no good whatsoever to the thousands of applicants who are not finding this data on program websites when they should, or (just as commonly, I'm afraid) are being refused this data when they request it or (in some rare instances) lied to about what the data is and/or its availability. On some level I wonder why a ranking should (or how it ethically can) acknowledge any data a program didn't see fit to offer, with equal alacrity, publicly and to its most important consumers--who are paying application fees for the privilege of being consumers--with the sort of transparency and broad dissemination that suggests the program is indeed willing to be accountable for that data.

I strongly believe MFA directors are near-universally well-intended; that said, when applicants have been crying for funding and admissions data, in the thousands, for more than a decade now in massive online communities MFA programs are aware of (and in many cases monitor), the claim that applicants had only to ask for this obviously-relevant data to then immediately receive it somehow rings false. While the consequence of using a philosophically-inflected research method is that the resultant data is (as the article, rankings, and widely-written-on research environment freely concedes) a) unscientific, and b) probative rather than conclusive, neither a scientific nor conclusive study of a target population can be conducted when--even under the most ideal conditions (cf. AWP's survey in 2007)--around half of the target population withholds the very data required by such a proposed methodology. To be candid, then, the question you've asked me is far better addressed to your fellow MFA directors, as only one of two possibilities can be readily envisioned: 1) your fellow directors did not want their efforts assessed (ever) and/or the resultant findings published (ever), and thus withheld the data (for years or decades) that would have made such an assessment possible, or 2) your fellow directors heartily (as you've indicated is the case for you yourself) welcomed such an analysis, and simply inexplicably failed to press the button on their PC keyboards which would have uploaded this absolutely foundational program data to their program's long-standing public website. In the article, then, when I refer to a "virtuous circle," this is what I'm referring to--the manner in which a ranking system can make programs more accountable to their prospective students, more transparent to the public, and (felicitously) convince programs to finally take measures to which, speaking in retrospect, they now claim to have been totally and without reservation amenable.

This is a brief answer to a question I hope to address in greater detail in the future, so I hope you won't mistake my candor here for sarcasm--to the extent I seem somewhat bewildered by any program's presently-declared willingness to provide information never before provided (but within the program's power to have immediately and publicly provided 24/7/365 for years), that bewilderment is not a put on, or intended as smarmy and performative, but sincere and abiding.

Best wishes,

Seth

Hi ewjunc, The article's reference to subjectivity was specifically targeted toward the history of rankings in this field, as well as the history of this particular research. The element of the data chart which is comprised of applicant polling is unscientific, has always been presented as such, and has never in three years claimed (online or in print) to be a scientific research study. Such a study would be impossible for two reasons (among others): 1) the programs are by and large withholding the data that would be necessary for a scientific research study; 2) scientific polling could likewise only be done with the assistance of the programs, which have thus far refused (at a rate greater than 50%, per AWP's 2007 survey) to respond to data queries from even their own professional organization. So when I spoke of "subjectivity" in the article, then, it was a reference to two things: 1) the most recent attempt at a ranking of programs, done in 2007 by Atlantic journo Ed Delaney (which Delaney himself said was not a "ranking," but which was undoubtedly "subjective" inasmuch as Delaney admitted his own opinions were given weight in calculating results); 2) the fact that many have referred to the TSE research, in the past, as "my" rankings, i.e. as a reflection of my own subjective opinion of which programs are best. They are not any such thing. The funding, selectivity, and placement rankings are based on hard data only. The polling is based singularly on the opinions of others, and is not inflected by my own opinions. You are certainly correct to say that every ranking system ever devised is--in one sense at least--subjective, because someone, somewhere, had to create its methodology. I rather think that would make the word "subjective" lose all meaning; indeed, if all rankings are by definition subjective, there's no possibility anyone would confuse anything I wrote for suggesting otherwise, as "objective" rankings (definitionally, per you) are impossible. I'm confident most readers took me to mean that these rankings do not reflect the subjective opinion of their author. But to say that these rankings "present [their] results as definitive," when the article accompanying the rankings explicitly disavows any such totalizing quality, is I think unfair. Likewise, to speak of statistical research of the doctoral sort is to make two mistakes: 1) it ignores the fact that creating a ranking methodology is a much more complex question than merely one of statistics (purpose, audience, impact, and many other pragmatic considerations come into play); 2) it presumes that we are in some sort of laboratory environment, and not one in which the test subjects have essentially, at a greater than 60% clip, fled the building and taken all their data with them. To repeat: A scientific study of MFA programs will be impossible until some organization or entity obligates these programs to compile and release such data publicly. Until that time comes, any research on MFA programs will be unscientific--though, as you concede is possible with these rankings (and as I believe with certainty is the case) they are probative. As to damaging the reputations of programs not in the top 50, I can only tell you that what I'm hearing from both applicants and the programs themselves is quite different from what you're describing: inasmuch as these rankings are the first ever comprehensive listing of domestic, full-residency MFA programs (don't forget that you can find programs #53 through #142 online, many of which have achieved a top 50 ranking in individual categories, and are noted for this), applicants are telling me that they're discovering new programs they never would have known about otherwise, and countless smaller programs are reporting, since the time the TSE research was initiated in 2007, significant increases in the size of their applicant pools. Be well, Seth

Hi there Kevin, thanks so much for your comment. I think you'd have to ask Tom directly to get his thoughts on this; I know he endorses MFA research generally, and in the past he's endorsed (indeed many times) my research in particular, but as to these specific rankings I've not asked his opinion so I couldn't tell you (though to the extent the methodology used here was the same as that which was used for the rankings Tom published [and I compiled] in the 2008 edition of the Handbook, I think many will, understandably, presume some form of tacit or explicit endorsement on Tom's part). With respect to Iowa's (approximately) #11 placement in Tom's rankings of five years ago, I believe (though again you'd have to check in with him on this) that a primary reason for that ranking was Tom's impression, at the time, that Iowa had a tiered funding system. In fact it does not, and in roughly 2005 it had just switched from a tiered to a fully-funded system -- but at that point, so close to the switch-over, Tom had been given bad information by someone who was only familiar with Iowa's old funding system under Frank Conroy (IWW Director, 1987-2005). Under Sam Chang all Iowa students are fully funded, and I'm fairly well convinced (knowing Tom) that had he had this information 4-5 years ago he would have put Iowa in the top ten nationally, though where in that top ten they would have gone (in his estimation) is -- again -- a question for Tom to answer, I think. Keep in mind that in the Second Edition of the Handbook (2008), Iowa is actually ranked #1 overall, top 25 in funding, and Top Tier (i.e. top 12) in the national comprehensive tiered rankings -- this last of which was the only ranking that included my own subjective opinions, but which I know Tom had indicated to me seemed very much in line with his own thinking. As to whether the rankings will appear in the next edition of the Handbook, I haven't spoken to Tom about this, though certainly if I do end up involved with that project, as I was in the last one, I'll have some input into that decision. Of course, if and when 2011 MFA rankings are released (and that's still something I haven't decided), a lot of things will need to be updated, including the Handbook. Again, thanks for the note! Be well, --S.