Jerry Saltz: An M.F.A. Caste Is Likewise Expensive, and That's Only the Offset of the Problem

Educational Circuitous, by Mike Kelley, at MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus /Courtesy of MoMA PS1

In her excellent essay, now out in Mod Painters, artist Coco Fusco pulls back the defunction on the risky business and chancy racket of the Master of Fine Arts degree. Fusco deftly addresses, among other things, how K.F.A. programs are "discursive battlefields." Whatever that means, she'due south right; I often have no idea what some teachers and students are talking nearly in group critiques. Her chief statement is financial: Fusco calls out skyrocketing tuition costs, massive student debt accrued — more than than almost whatever artist will be able to repay in a lifetime — and shitty job prospects.

Amen. I'm a dead-ender with no degrees, but I take been lucky plenty to practice a lot of teaching. I think it's not bad for young artists to go to grad school if they've got the fourth dimension, inclination, and money — whether it's Mom and Dad'due south coin or a trust fund. Artists seem to thrive during these two years of enforced art-making, staying upwardly very late and learning things with each other long after the professors have gone home for the night. New languages are incubated. But I've also witnessed — and may have been responsible for — a lot of bullshit. Iffy artist-teachers wield enormous creative and intellectual influence over students, favors are doled out in power cliques. Zealous theoreticians continue to scare the creativity and opinions out their 3rd generation of immature artists and critics. Too many students brand highly derivative work (often like that of their teachers) and no one tells them so. A lot of artists in these programs larn how to talk a good game instead of being honestly self-critical about their ain work.

All this may be the same as it always was. What'southward different now is that MFA programs are exorbitantly priced luxury items. At the top-shelf East Declension schools like Yale, RISD, SVA, and Columbia, the two-year cost can top $100,000. This doesn't include room, board, materials, etc. Add together all that in, and you lot're hovering well-nigh a quarter-1000000 dollars. No matter how wonderful the M.F.A. experience, that'south straight-upwards highway robbery. If well-off parents tin can handle information technology as one last extravagance, sure — but we're at present at the signal where only the offspring of the very rich tin attend these schools. All electric current grad students should ask their regular teachers a question: "Exercise you know what the base tuition for an MFA is in this program?" It borders on the blithe and unethical for them non to know.

Those of us who teach commonly do so because we need the money; most of us also genuinely honey the chore. Still, if these programs are too expensive, we are a part of the trouble, and demand to change. (Although the larger issue may exist that the schools treat M.F.A. students as cash cows.) This semester I took a one-third cut in salary and workload at the school where I teach, and information technology hurt a lot. Yet I think more than schools take to consider doing this, and cutting tuition fees, and put a lot more than grant coin at the disposal of their students. Something'southward got to give.

I used to teach regularly at three schools. I now teach at one, having resigned (amicably; I didn't have the time for all three) from Columbia and the School of Visual Arts. These are peachy schools, places where I got more than from the students than I ever gave them. Notwithstanding my sense is that a lot of u.s.a. teachers stay on the task for also long. I'm all for wisdom, experience, and providing models for lives lived in art. Notwithstanding I'm too struck by how oftentimes teachers get stuck in the era that they emerged in, valorizing that past to impressionable students as a ameliorate, purer time, often pooh-poohing the present and sniping about other, younger teachers.

Longtime instructors — like me — might take their hours cut back to make room for newer teachers to take the stage. (This idea has been floated in several schools that I know of, and agreed to in principle with no follow-through.) Call me conservative, but information technology's also fourth dimension for grad programs to stress courses in craft and various skills — from blacksmithing to beast tracking, if these are things students demand to learn for the visions they want to pursue. There should be a lot more fine art history in add-on to all the current theory. Add all this to the secret knowledge that students are imparting to one another, make more grant money bachelor, and grad programs will serve students rather than teachers and administrations. Especially if they can get the cost downwardly.

Not simply is it time to rethink the most expensive Chiliad.F.A. programs, it's time for applicants to seize with teeth the bullet and consider the enormous benefits of less expensive, less sexy-sounding schools that will exit them with much less debt. I've taught at institutions beyond the prestige spectrum. Truthfully? Students who get to loftier-contour schools become a subtle xviii-month bump later on they graduate, in part because dealers and collectors (oy) meet their M.F.A. shows. However, one time this short-term advantage dissipates, the artist becomes one in a crowd, with a mountain of debt, and may need to have a full-time job indefinitely to pay it off. There's no surer way to throw abroad that early on reward than getting a task that saps their art-making energy.

I believe that many of the less-expensive, non-marquee schools at present take parity with — and are sometimes better than — the sexy top tier. Trust me; I've taught at them all. And should be fired.

Saltz on the Trouble With the M.F.A.