Funding 101

Check it out: Seth Abramson's Funding Rankings on The Suburban Ecstasies. Fantastic stuff. I kind of wish I had this kind of resource when I was applying to schools last fall. Not that the knowledge would have changed my list (it wouldn't have), but rather, it would have provided a large measure of comfort for me in my decision making. To have a comprehensive list of schools, from one to fifty, documenting funding, length, and teaching load is nothing short of fantastic. It's a great read, regardless of whether you're currently (or will be) attending school or gearing up to apply for 2010.

As for the list itself, I am relatively unsurprised. To trumpet the University of Illinois' funding briefly, it comes as no shock to me that it ranks so highly at number three, as the University of Illinois manages to provide full funding for all its students through its incredibly tiny cohorts (three poets, three fiction writers a year) with many TA and internship opportunities. Every student teaches one section in their first year, and then two sections (or a combination of TAing and internships) in their remaining two years. TAing (based on previous years) gives an approximately $9,000 stipend. That totals ~$9K for the first year, and ~$18K for the remaining two. Combine that with the ridiculously low cost of living in Champaign-Urbana (single apartments go for $400-500, depending on how nice you want to go), and you have one of the best financial packages in the country. Surprised? I was too in my research of the program and subsequent acceptance. You'd figure that the University of Illinois would be a more widely regarded program based on the strength of its funding package alone. What most don't realize is that the University of Illinois is, relatively speaking, a very young program, established in just 2002.

Also unsurprising to me is the kind of footprint that Midwestern and Southern schools have on the list. Out of the top fifteen schools, seven are located in the Midwest -- University of Illinois, Indiana University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Washington University at St. Louis, University of Michigan, and Southern Illinois University. In the top twenty, nine schools. The South, has six schools in the top fifteen, and nine in the top twenty. As I've intimated in previous posts, this kind of funding pattern is unsurprising. The major metropolitan areas in the United States -- the West Coast and East Coast, Chicago, etc. -- are replete with writers and writing communities by virtue of their large, concentrated populations. This is why so many schools located in these areas can sustain programs, some of them very prestigious, with little to no funding (Columbia, The New School, NYU, Northwestern). Simply, they don't need to offer their students funding; they have more than enough people living close by who are willing to pay full price. In contrast, the Midwest and the South, outside of the few major metropolitan areas, must provide aggressive funding packages to attract people out of necessity. To a writer living in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles, where many advantages of lifestyle and community are afforded to them, the prospect of moving to a town with a population of fifty thousand is made that much more appealing with the prospect of a fully funded program.

At any rate, Seth's list is an excellent jumping off point for anyone compiling a list of schools, especially if funding is one of your top priorities. It is important to note, however, that some schools, like the University of Minnesota, Syracuse, and Johns Hopkins, are all listed in the mid-thirties because of a lack of information in regards to their exact funding. I know all three programs fully fund their students, and probably quite well, however the lack of information unfortunately damages them in their standing -- how can you rank a school without any hard numbers? So I guess the lesson is, do your research. Regardless of Seth's wonderful funding list, I'd still apply to Syracuse and Johns Hopkins if I had to do it all over again.

Retrospective: The Importance of Choosing Wisely

The list of schools you choose to apply to is important. Even before you start applying in the months of November, December, and January, the very act of choosing is important. Why? The list is a malleable thing, right? If you don't like this school, just remove it, and if you like that school, just add it? Which is true. In fact, I was constantly tinkering with my school list weeks, days before I was set to start applying. I added a couple schools at the last second on a whim. I removed one on another whim. There's no doubt that choosing where to apply to is more art than science; these are the realities of applying to grad school. And if I had unlimited resources with unlimited man-hours, I would have applied to every last school in the country. But that's the problem -- who has over a thousand bucks to spare? Who has forty, fifty hours of free time to spend on applying to grad schools during the holidays? Resources are finite, and when applying, even if it is as many schools as twelve, thirteen, fourteen, you truly have to make every one count.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. As wise man Tom Kealey says, there are many factors that one should keep in mind when compiling a list, each of which have varying degrees of importance, depending on the individual. But they are (in no particular order): funding, location, faculty, prestige, length of program, size of cohort. Give or take a few factors, depending on your personal preference. For me, funding and location trumped the list, which I imagine it probably did (and will) for many individuals. But let's forget about the what was most important to me. I think at the end of it all, there's an exceedingly important question everyone has to ask themselves before sinking the time, money, and energy into applications, a question that I did not always ask myself in compiling my schools list: When faced with a hypothetical acceptance from a particular school with no other acceptances, would you be able to, hands down, take that offer? This question obviously scales with what's important to you on the list. If funding is vital, then you'd have to ask yourself the same question, except include the "worst case scenario" funding situation -- ie, accepted to Columbia, but with no funding. Would you still take the offer with no other prospects on the horizon?

I know this seems like an exceedingly obvious question to ask, building a "worst case scenario" situation, but I can't tell you how difficult it was to be this honest with myself in creating the list. There was a tremendous pull to just throw any school that met my minimum standards on the list, and let them sort it out in the end. The problem was that this strategy was unreasonable when it came to application time. Was it really realistic to spend around $80 on application fees, printing materials, postage, and countless man-hours on a school in another state, another timezone that ultimately provided little to no funding? For me, such a scenario was unrealistic. While it's true that the first application is really the hardest, each following application did not become linearly easier to compile with time. If anything, the complexity of assembling all the materials stayed the same -- I simply became more adept with putting it together. And yet, I cannot tell you how many hours I spent checking and rechecking each item to make sure I had every "i" dotted, and still made significant mistakes; one on my manuscript, another on my applications. Mistakes can and will happen.

I guess what I'm saying is that my list could've been better constructed, with what I now know and what I have experienced. I don't regret the outcome, not for a second. Yet I wonder what my application season would've looked like had I omitted Syracuse (for location reasons) and Western Michigan (for funding reasons) from the list. If every other school had rejected me, save for WMU, I doubt that I would've been able to attend without a sniff of funding. If Syracuse had accepted me, I wonder how easy it would have been for me to say yes, based on personal situations. Would I have been better served to add the University of Minnesota and Southern Illinois in place of those schools? Who knows. Choosing between 2-4 acceptances is tough enough. Having to choose between waiting for next year's application season and an unfunded offer (or worse, a fully funded offer that you can't attend for personal/locational reasons) is tougher.

Funding Wars

I would like to direct your attention to an article published last year in The Altlantic here, courtesy of Nillywilly on the Speakeasy Forums. It comes in at a hefty 10-11 pages, and touches on all the important (and interesting) MFA-related topics such as funding, prestige, alumni, faculty, etc.

Most interesting to me was the segment on "Funding" on pages 4-6 of the article, which goes into great detail about the "funding wars" occurring with the elite programs, the Virginia's, Iowa's, Michigan's, Texas', Irvine's, of the country. Specifically, what struck me was how much like college sports recruiting the whole process was. If you know anything about college recruiting (football and basketball being the most glamorous of the college sports), you'd understand that an "arms race" of funding and courting occurs between schools in the furious grab to sign the best of the best every year -- and has been going for years, decades. In fact, whole communities and websites have popped up around the concept of recruitment -- ever wanted to know who were the top defensive backs of 2009's high school class? Well, now you can find out here.

And what do these elite sport schools do to court the very best? They provide scholarships. Waive tuitions. Promise the best and the brightest coaches. Offer the most sophisticated and state-of-the-art training facilities and gyms. Is this so different from what's happening with the MFA? As Edward Delany intimates in his article, the most prestigious MFA programs "bid" over the finest talents with higher and higher stipends, better and bigger-named faculty, and varied and inventive classes and programs. It's wildly interesting to me, to suddenly realize that this is really just what college football and basketball have been doing for decades -- now in the very subjective arena of creative writing programs.

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.

F is for Funding

I'll have a writeup on the subject of funding one of these days, but here's some required reading, provided by Seth Abramson on the Poets & Writers website. A great article that touches on a lot of the salient points for the discerning MFA applicant -- how one type of funding differs from another, what's important in funding dollars, etc. -- as well as an in-depth look at the top funded programs in the country. An excellent place to get started for your own research on the behemoth that is MFA program funding. And trust me, research is a necessity.