Poets & Writers recently ranked the country’s MFA programs, and as rankings often do, it is being received with some hostility. Their hierarchy of MFA programs is based on the word of mouth of MFA applicants, rather than the US News-style algorithm (which has got its own controversy).
Though the ranking did come with a disclaimer, this wasn’t enough precaution to preclude the backlash— it incited around two hundred faculty members from creative writing programs far and wide to craft an open letter describing the irresponsibility of such an unscientific ranking system. Ranking systems are often questionable, but aren’t such biases even more pronounced with these creative degrees?
“…it’s not black and white, and when you think about it, programs like these aren’t really that rankable. What if your favorite writer teaches at a program at the bottom of the list? What qualifies as a successful graduate: a creative-writing teacher, a best-selling novelist, or someone who has honed his or her writing in an extraordinary way but fails to put it to work professionally?”
3 responses
The idea of a small number of prospective applicants on one or two blogs deciding the “ranking” of MFA programs is patently absurd. Everyone I know who has gone through MFA programs finds these rankings highly suspicious, but I do understand that prospective applicants get desperate for information and people love ranking.
If you absolutely HAVE to rank programs, why not rank them by the percentage of graduates who publish a book within five years of graduating?
It’s sad to see Poets & Writers getting so much bad press and becoming such a lightening rod for controversy. I always saw P&W as a publication that brought the writing community together, not one that polarized it.
I think they need to consider the damage these rankings are doing to their reputation, whether they believe in them or not, especially when you have 200 of the most respected professors and writers in the country calling them out publicly like this. It’s an embarrassment for to say the least.
The sad thing is that the P&W rankings do provide some badly needed information, most notably, which schools fund and how much they fund, and what they ask in return for the funding. MFA programs vary widely in this regard, and it’s good to have a central clearinghouse of sorts for would-be applicants to access that sort of information.
The problem is that these rankings go farther than that, and as Harwood pointed out, they do so in a fairly sketchy way, statistically speaking. That said, this objection by the professors: “We agree that financial aid must be a serious consideration, but a student’s relationship with his or her faculty—what and how one learns—is at least equally as important” is a little ridiculous, because there’s no way to know what your relationship with the professors is going to be like until you’re in the program. But you can know what the money situation is going to be, and if you think that workload and/or money tightness isn’t going to affect your MFA experience, then you need to spend some time in the cheap seats again.
And the comment about how the application process not being adversarial? Maybe from the school’s perspective, but applicants talk about entrance into programs being competitive for a reason.
I would love it if Poets and Writers changed the format from one of ranking to one of information providing. List the schools by the number of applications they receive, the number of people they take, the amount of money the students receive and what they have to do to get it, and whether or not everyone gets the same amount.
Oh, and also list how long each program is expected to take, because not all MFAs are equal in that respect either.
Look, rankings sell, just like lists do. That’s why magazines run them. They’re easy, and they stir up controversy, which results in page views and/or publication sales. I fully expect P&W to be back next year with another set of rankings, perhaps with a tweak or two, and absolutely begging for CW professors everywhere to get outraged enough to blow up blogs and Facebook pages and Twitter streams the world over (assuming we’re still using those and haven’t moved on to something else by then).
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