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.

The Semi-Final List

Everyone loves lists. Here's mine (the semi-final version, with one school's response still yet unheard):

University of Illinois - officially accepted
Western Michigan University - accepted (turned down)
Roosevelt University (Chicago) - accepted (turned down)
Purdue University - waitlisted * (turned down)
University of Notre Dame - waitlisted (turned down)
University of Michigan - rejected
Washington University - rejected
University of Iowa - rejected
Indiana University - rejected
Syracuse University - rejected
Ohio State University - rejected
Johns Hopkins - rejected
Columbia College (Chicago) - no answer

* Purdue's selection process relies on a system where the top 15-20 candidates for poetry and fiction each are selected. Out of these candidates, the final slots are eventually filled with permission from the Director of Composition, who has final say. This selection process works as a kind of quasi-waitlist. Details of Purdue's process can be found here.


Some observations. A wise man would tell you that the MFA selection process is at times an incredibly luck-based and arbitrary process. There are countless stories of people getting into Iowa and being rejected from a small state school in the same year. Yet when examining my list, where I got in and waitlisted, and where I did not, there seems, at least to me, an obvious pattern. Simply, that I couldn't crack the very elite schools, the schools that populate the top 20, top 15 lists -- Syracuse, Iowa, Indiana, John Hopkins, Michigan. It seems like a simple enough explanation: I simply wasn't good enough this year. But although I love the simple explanations, I also think it's a little more complicated than that.

There's the obvious question of sample size. Thirteen schools and one year's worth of data is far too little for any meaningful result. And what about school aesthetics? I've also found in my communication with other potential MFAers this year that there seems to be an extremely high correlation between folks who got accepted into Illinois, who also got an offer from Purdue (or waitlisted) and Notre Dame, and vice versa. Coincidence? I don't know. You expect some measure of overlap between the students that schools will fight over -- talent is talent -- but I counted, including myself, about a half dozen people who got a positive response from more than one of the schools I mentioned above. That is an extremely high number for schools that will only have incoming cohorts of 3-5 students apiece. In my opinion, there's definitely a case of school specific aesthetics in play here. And uncoincidentally, it's also a regional pattern -- the schools in the same locations will get a huge overlap of students applying to all or most of the schools in the same general area.

Speculation, of course. All I have to go off of are the schools I've researched and read. I do wonder if these patterns appear in other regions as well. What about the schools in Florida? New York? North Carolina? If I were a betting man, I'd wager that there'd be an overlapping pattern of schools with similar aesthetics, along with a regional pattern of schools pulling from similar application bases and certain locations.