Purdue's Funding

An excellent post on the MFA Blog on Purdue's funding for their Creative Writing students, which you can find here. Best of all, it's straight from the Associate Director of Purdue's Creative Writing program, so you can pretty much take it as gospel.

As to the stipend amount, $13,000 is definitely livable, and up to $19,000 is downright comfortable. The key is the cost of living in West Lafayette, which is incredibly low. When I was an undergrad at Purdue, I lived in what was considered some very swanky accommodations location-wise (extremely close to campus), and paid barely more than $500 a month. You could easily get into the $400 range if you consider housing off of campus. Plus, everything is cheap. Food is cheap, utilities are cheap, even the bars are cheap. If memory serves me correctly, they have 25-cent beer nights at the Cactus bar on Tuesdays... but don't quote me on that.

It's all nice, if you can get it. Consider Purdue's Creative Writing admission rates in 2007, per Seth Abramson's admissions writeup: 100 applications, 4 acceptances. And that's for Fiction alone. Yikes. That's a 4% acceptance rate in 2007. 2009? Probably lower, to be completely honest. If you just double the amount of applications (something I can see happening very easily), then you're looking at a 2% acceptance rate. Programs like Purdue, which offer stellar funding for their students, have and will continue to get all kinds of press -- the posting on the MFA blog, the large mention in Poets & Writers article, and so on. That Purdue had only gotten 100 applications in 2007 shows how much of an unknown it was just a few years ago, yet how incredibly competitive it was and will still further become.