2025 Creative Writing MFA Applicants Forum

[Tuxedocat]

5 minutes ago, Allrich90 said:

I guess that means, that I can only expect a rejection ;(

You could still get a waitlist!!! Please don’t give up hope yet. And who knows, maybe they aren’t done sending acceptances.

[Hjanep]

1 hour ago, Catpaw said:

I would actually love to hear other people's answers to this. I don't know that this question has come up in quite this form before.

My impression is that, among the fully-funded schools, prestige is a mix of self-propagating reputation + a higher stipend and/or famous faculty (ideally both, but sometimes—like with Syracuse—the faculty are famous enough that people overlook the meh stipend).

Vanderbilt is a relatively new program, for example, but it developed a reputation fast, in part because their stipend is among the highest, and they brought in some prestigious faculty. So a lot of people apply, and it lets them be choosy with their cohort, and bam. A burgeoning reputation.

Iowa, on the other hand, has kind of a 'meh' stipend compared to many. And—this is very subjective and I'm almost leery of saying it—I don't feel that their core faculty are often the main draw, for most applicants...? But its reputation is everything, and they've graduated so many reputable authors that everyone can name at least one author they admire who studied at Iowa... Its huge applicant pool and large cohort size also helps maintain their reputation, because it lets them pick a large number of top applicants. So inevitably there are rising stars who graduate from each cohort. But there are also plenty of Iowa graduates who come out of the program and essentially never write again. I know two personally. They do accept (and graduate) a lot of duds, which I think is true of most programs honestly, but with Iowa it's kinda hidden by the large cohort size.

I also get the impression that semi-arbitrary online ranking systems can perpetuate a sense of 'reputation'. UVA recently got a huge boost in its online ranking reputation (probably helped, too, by the big increase in their stipend!) but I remember a few years back when their reputation was more muted. Even though the core faculty have remained nearly identical throughout? But the reshuffling of online rankings (plus, I guess, the better stipend) really increased their applicant size.

I think Johns Hopkins is the main school I think of where their reputation is presented to applicants as numbers-based. Yes they have famous faculty, yes they have a really high stipend, but also they present metrics such as "many of our graduates have signed a book deal three years within graduating" or "many of our graduates go on to receive Stegner Fellowships" and it's hard to argue with results like that. But it's also telling of their focus. It smells, to me, like a self-selecting prophecy—it says that they're going to select for students whose works already feel like they could be mainstream-publishable, and whose aesthetic maps to what the Stegner Fellowship likes to see. Aka, there's a good chance that many of their students would have gotten an agent (or a Stegner Fellowship) within five years anyways, even if they hadn't applied to Hopkins. Because those are the type of students that Hopkins is looking for, and accepting.

In contrast, some programs don't allow agents on their campus at all, and they put the focus entirely on the writing for writing's sake. Those programs are looking for a very different kind of student.

I feel, too, that some reputations come across as near-universal (Iowa, for example) but a lot of it is subjective... I don't get a strong sense of Cornell having a 'universal prestige' reputation for example (they are very reputable, don't get me wrong!), but I definitely feel like Michener has that reputation? In my head, I see Iowa, Michener, and Michigan as the 'top 3' in terms of prestige and name-recognition, but I feel like this is so fuzzy as a metric, and I'm really interested to see how my internal sense compares to other people's perceptions!

(Also I should add that I'm thinking from the POV of fiction. I am sure that it's a bit different for poetry or CNF.)

I almost entirely agree with this assessment

[hopeful poet 2025]

Really thinking we will start to get a lot of answers this week. Wanted to hop in and tell y'all that I got an acceptance call from Texas State (poetry) today! I was at work, so it was totally chaotic. Bianca Perez was so kind, though. She told me she will call me again with information regarding funding in about two weeks, after their spring break.

I was also offered half-line funding from Stony Brook. They told me I am in consideration for full funding if more money becomes available or  someone doesn't accept their full-time TAship. I really like all the programs I applied to-- whether fully funded or partially-- but I need to make it make sense financially for me. So fingers crossed I get good funding news from some where! 

Rooting for all of you!! ❤️ 

2a/1w/2r/6p

[Chex]

3 minutes ago, hopeful poet 2025 said:

Really thinking we will start to get a lot of answers this week. Wanted to hop in and tell y'all that I got an acceptance call from Texas State (poetry) today! I was at work, so it was totally chaotic. Bianca Perez was so kind, though. She told me she will call me again with information regarding funding in about two weeks, after their spring break.

I was also offered half-line funding from Stony Brook. They told me I am in consideration for full funding if more money becomes available or  someone doesn't accept their full-time TAship. I really like all the programs I applied to-- whether fully funded or partially-- but I need to make it make sense financially for me. So fingers crossed I get good funding news from some where! 

Rooting for all of you!! ❤️ 

2a/1w/2r/6p

Congrats!!! I'm out of reactions so typing my own 💙 here. 

[KennyK]

Quiet day

[exvat]

1 hour ago, hopeful poet 2025 said:

Really thinking we will start to get a lot of answers this week. Wanted to hop in and tell y'all that I got an acceptance call from Texas State (poetry) today! I was at work, so it was totally chaotic. Bianca Perez was so kind, though. She told me she will call me again with information regarding funding in about two weeks, after their spring break.

I was also offered half-line funding from Stony Brook. They told me I am in consideration for full funding if more money becomes available or  someone doesn't accept their full-time TAship. I really like all the programs I applied to-- whether fully funded or partially-- but I need to make it make sense financially for me. So fingers crossed I get good funding news from some where! 

Rooting for all of you!! ❤️ 

2a/1w/2r/6p

Congrats!!!

[Nauna]

1 hour ago, KennyK said:

Quiet day

VERY quiet day! I was thinking we'd be seeing more activity on the spreadsheet considering some schools are heading to spring break this week. 🤷🏽‍♀️

[OctopusCactus]

IMO prestige is largely a question of audience.  Prestigious to who?

On Draft and this forum, which are composed almost entirely of current and aspiring MFA students, things like high stipends and small cohort size factor heavily into how prestigious a program is perceived to be.  This makes sense because these are communities where people actually know how much different schools pay in stipends, how hard they are to get into, etc.  But that isn't universal knowledge, even within the literary world.

TBH I have been surprised by the gap between what programs people I know in the lit world talk about/attended and which programs on Draft are regarded as prestigious because it's mostly not the same programs (with the exception of Iowa).  These people don't know about stipends, they know more about who teaches where and successful alums.  So for them prestige seems to be more about faculty than anything else.

[Mystic_Sunshine]

39 minutes ago, Nauna said:

VERY quiet day! I was thinking we'd be seeing more activity on the spreadsheet considering some schools are heading to spring break this week. 🤷🏽‍♀️

please tell me that next week won't be torturous and silent because of spring break. 

Someone sedate me. 

[nauseated]

crickets for me since my Michener rejection and JHU silence-cum-rejection. only NWP and Brown left so I have 99% accepted my lack of MFA-ness this year. but would like to KNOWWWWW

[exvat]

4 minutes ago, nauseated said:

crickets for me since my Michener rejection and JHU silence-cum-rejection. only NWP and Brown left so I have 99% accepted my lack of MFA-ness this year. but would like to KNOWWWWW

Fingers crossed for yooouuuuu 🤞🤞 May you be at eeeeease 🙏