Poets and Writers published their second annual MFA ranking. Not really any surprises — in fact, not one of the top ten programs even shifted a single place. Of course, the folks over at AWP have already panned the rankings quite devastatingly. In addition to those fine critiques, I have a few of my own.
- Since the rankings are built largely upon polling the opinions of prospective students, the ranking tends to be self-reinforcing. In other words, students see how high certain schools are ranked, which increases their desire to go to those schools, which makes them rank those schools highly in the following year. To accurately place MFA programs, there should be polls of exiting graduates and alumni of each program in addition to these prospective students.
- Because prospective students are the only people polled in this evaluation, it’s a ranking of perceived value, not actual value. It’s only how good the car looks on the outside, not how it drives or its resale value. Of course, that’s not to say how the programs look from the outside is inconsequential — in fact, it can be quite valuable. But it is only one perspective among many.
Keeping those critiques in mind, I still think the rankings serve a useful function. They help give newbie writers and prospective MFA students some baseline information about very general estimations of programs.
Because of that, I applaud Poets and Writers for publishing such information. I just want several things: for prospective MFA students to understand the faults of the rankings, their limitations, and to do plenty of research on their own.
6 comments
Hi,
Just wanted to note that you might have accidentally clicked on the link to the 2010 rankings? Several schools moved positions between the 2010 top 10 and the 2011 top 10, including at least one program dropping out of the top 10 altogether — so I’m not sure what you mean about no top 10 programs moving at all.
S.
Hi Seth,
I think I thought no schools moved because of the Trend category, but I suppose that referred to something else.
My mistake.
Hi again,
Yeah, “Trend” just measures whether that program moved more than five spots up or down since the previous year. That category may be nixed next year in favor of a more informative one providing related information.
S.
What’s interesting is how so few writers are able to question the existence of MFA programs. Widespread is an institutional mindset. Few are able to defend them.
Can you? (See the points at my blog.)
http://www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com
-Karl Wenclas
Thanks for pointing out why the MFA rankings should be regarded with skepticism. Still, I think Seth Abramson is right to make information about funding, teaching loads, etc. available. Yes, let’s poll graduates of MFA programs, too. Let’s press programs to provide great teaching, full funding, and sensible teaching loads.
I find it a bit odd that they’re using PROSPECTIVE students to rank these schools, rather than GRADUATES of the programs, who might be better able to give opinions on what the school concretely did (or didn’t do) to help them with their writing and the publication thereof. I mean, wouldn’t that be more helpful information? At the very least, it’d be nice to see it factored in there somehow.
Additionally, I’d be curious to know what the professors teaching those programs have to say about them, but I suppose that info might be a lot harder to acquire, given the politics involved.