The List, Part Two

I neglected to mention in my last post that I consider Roosevelt and Columbia College as my backup schools. While I understand there’s no such thing as a “safety” school, I also know that the competition for schools without significant (if any) funding is vastly lower. This is definitely the case for most major metropolitan schools -- schools located in NY, Chicago, and San Francisco -- and as such, one can see that their acceptance rates (taken from Seth Abramson’s Suburban Ecstasies) are much more forgiving, with Columbia College running at about 16%, for example. Why? Major cities have built-in populations from where they can pull potential applicants. In contrast, it’s easy to imagine how schools in tiny towns such as Bloomington, IN or Champaign, IL lack that natural population advantage. To attract talent, small towns have to develop and offer outstanding funding to compensate.

This isn’t necessarily an indictment on the quality of schools in major cities. Columbia College, Roosevelt, and Northwestern’s are fine programs. Yet one can see where the bulk of applications go every year. They follow the money. And why shouldn’t they? As Tom Kealey says, unless you’re independently wealthy, there’s no good reason to go into debt for an MFA degree.

So with that in mind, the rest of my list is heavily based on funding. Of the remaining 11 schools, eight of them provide full or near full funding. The other three provide significant funding (one of them Iowa). Here they are:

Notre Dame
University of Michigan
John Hopkins
Syracuse University
Ohio State University
Washington University (in St. Louis)
University of Illinois
Iowa University
Indiana University
Western Michigan University
Purdue University