Welcome to The Forever Workshop’s MFA Newsletter, a monthly column about career advancement in the literary space. Everything published here is free to enjoy, courtesy of our partnered universities. (Not interested? Turn off emails from this column here.)
We’ve all heard it.
“Don’t pay for your MFA.”
We’ve filled out applications for Iowa, Johns Hopkins, Oregon State, Brown–in hopes that we’d be accepted into their fully-funded programs. But maybe rejections were all we received, since of the hundreds of MFA programs in the country, only 53 are fully-funded, and they’re small, selective. For example, Vanderbilt only accepts four students per cohort.
Dominique Weldon mentioned the phrase when I asked if she’d applied to any fully-funded MFA programs. Like most emerging writers, her undergraduate professors warned her against spending thousands of dollars on a degree that sometimes has little to no return on investment. So, heeding their advice, she spent a year researching programs to apply to, prioritizing fully-funded ones. But her list also included MFAs that appealed to her personally. “I was willing to take a partially-funded program that worked better for my life and goals,” Dominique told me, which is how she ended up applying to Butler University. Although it wasn’t fully-funded, she wanted to stay in the Midwest and she was interested in the Butler community.
After she was accepted into Butler’s MFA program, Dominique reached out to ask if they had any scholarships that she didn’t know about. “They offered me a $10,000 scholarship,” she told me. It wouldn’t cover her whole degree, but Butler’s MFA checked other boxes that she deemed more important. To make up the remaining cost, Dominique worked part-time and took advantage of the opportunities that Butler offered, like a teaching assistantship and working as the Nonfiction Editor for the program’s literary journal, Booth, both which paid a stipend. She did have to take out loans, but the amount she has to pay back is feasible for her, especially since she doesn’t have any debt from undergrad. “My number one goal was to get better at my craft,” Dominique shared, and so getting this education was worth the money.
Like Dominique, Katie Mihalek prioritized location. She applied to MFAs near Boston because she and her partner lived there, and she wanted to stay local after spending years having their relationship long-distance. “Having a partner and him having this stable job allowed me [...] to have a little more flexibility,” Katie shared, because this meant that she had help with paying the mortgage and everyday expenses. So although she applied to fully-funded programs, she was comfortable with ultimately choosing to earn her MFA at Emerson College.
The biggest chunk of Katie’s funding came from part-time jobs and loans–between starting and finishing her MFA, she worked at a farmer’s market, sold furniture, and taught in Emerson College’s first year writing program. “If you’re a staff member or already a teacher, you can get tuition waived as a full-time student,” Katie explained, though because she was a part-time professor, those benefits didn’t apply to her. But if you’re currently working full-time at a college that houses an MFA program, you can see if those benefits would apply to you.
After her MFA, Katie worked as an AmeriCorps fellow for MassPoetry, which gave her a $7,500 Education Award at the end of her service year. “This could be applied to future tuition or a loan, so I applied it to my loans,” Katie said, since Emerson College is one of the many colleges in the country who partner with AmeriCorps. Although Emerson doesn’t, some MFA programs even offer discounted tuition to national service volunteers specifically.
National service is what funded both of Brandon Hubbard’s MFAs, his first earned at Lesley University, his second in progress at the Brooklyn Writers Foundry. Brandon served in the U.S. Army Reserve in the 2000s; this made him eligible for the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which, for him, covered 36 months worth of higher education and provided a housing stipend to help with the cost of residencies. Without this funding, Brandon said, “it wouldn’t have been an option for [him] to get an MFA.”
Brandon didn’t apply to any fully-funded programs, and neither did Amy Lees, a Navy veteran who also attends the Brooklyn Writers Foundry. “I didn’t want to go into a program with a lot of strings attached, and I wasn’t looking to relocate,” Amy explained. Brandon was in a similar mindset. “Applying and not getting in [to a fully-funded program] deterred me because I didn’t want to lose a year, six months,” he said. “I wanted to get it done.” These goals led Brandon and Amy to low-residency programs, and so fully-funded programs weren’t an option because none of them offer the low-residency model.
“I don’t want to come off as a platform for selling the GI bill to writers,” Brandon shared. Amy echoed his sentiment: “It’s a little chaotic for that.” But if you’re currently in the military, Amy recommends “[leveraging] as much of the education benefits as humanly possible.”
While Amy is still earning her degree, she’s set to be published in the EcoTheo Review this winter. Dominique now teaches for the Indiana Writers Center, a job which she landed because of teaching while getting her MFA. Katie now attends the University of Rhode Island, and she said her MFA was “worth it to pay and get to where [she is] now, which is a fully-funded PhD in English, with a creative dissertation but doing a lot of critical work and maintaining poetic practice on the side.”
So here’s my hot take: apply to the MFAs that aren’t fully-funded, the ones your professors warned you against, in addition to fully-funded programs. I’m not saying go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for them, but there are ways to fund your MFA without taking out huge loans.
Applying to MFA programs that aren’t fully-funded allowed these writers to fulfill their artistic goals, and they wouldn’t have been able to achieve them if they waited for an acceptance to a fully-funded program or if they gave up when the rejections came in. But if you do apply for an MFA you have to pay for, remember to make intentional financial decisions, be honest with yourself about what you can afford, and supplement the tuition with outside aid. If you want a place to start exploring, many of our MFA partners offer competitive or partial funding, in addition to all of the opportunities they provide their students (not least, access to Chill Subs!).
“If you live and breathe writing and want to be in community with other writers,” Dominique said, “go for the partially-funded program.” She doesn’t regret it, and neither will you.
How did your fund your MFA? Let us know in the comments!