On a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of the 2024 spring semester, author Laurie Foos, a fiction instructor in the Goddard College low-residency MFA program in creative writing, received an e-mail stating that the eighty-six-year-old college in Plainfield, Vermont, would shut down for good in August.
“There was absolutely no warning,” says Foos, noting that all of the approximately ten faculty members of the program, founded in 1963, have lost their jobs. The closure was also “hugely disruptive” for the roughly two dozen students in the program. Those who still had coursework to complete before graduation have been offered opportunities to transfer to other schools, while graduates were left feeling cheated. “They were very angry about the fact that they had spent all this money and all this time on a degree that they felt would become meaningless,” says Foos.
The shutdown of Goddard is one of several creative writing MFA programs that during the past year announced they were closing, including the Red Earth MFA at Oklahoma City University as well as programs at Purdue University and Georgia State University. This follows the shutdown of a number of other MFA programs in recent years, including those at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Hofstra University and Ithaca College in New York, Mills College in Oakland, and Western New England University in Springfield, Massachusetts, as well as low-residency programs at the University of Tampa, the University of Alaska in Anchorage, Murray State University in Kentucky, and Chatham University in Pittsburgh.
The spate of closures comes after decades of explosive growth in university creative writing programs. When Associated Writing Programs (AWP) was founded in 1967 (it was renamed the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in 2003), only thirteen college creative writing programs existed; there are now more than two hundred MFA programs in creative writing alone, according to the Poets & Writers MFA Programs database. Still, some see the recent wave of MFA shutdowns as a troubling sign for the future of advanced degrees in creative writing.
While no single cause can explain the recent MFA program closures, they likely stem from a confluence of factors—monetary pressures on universities and waning interest in the humanities being two of the biggest issues. Indeed, Goddard, a liberal arts college, reportedly shut down because of declining enrollment and financial insolvency. At Purdue, the university administration cut admissions across several English graduate programs in recent years, ending the MFA program “by default” this past spring, says Brian Leung, a fiction writer and a professor in the program who continues to teach undergraduates at Purdue. Leung sees the MFA closure at the school as part of an emerging pattern of colleges emphasizing science, technology, and related fields, which tend to bring more federal grant money to colleges than the arts.
“MFA programs, despite all the value and prestige they bring to the university, are targets for elimination because they are an expense, unless they are supported by an endowment,” Leung says. At Purdue, MFA students taught undergraduates in exchange for financial packages. Many graduate-level writing programs are similarly structured, which can cost a university tens of thousands of dollars per student—money that may be saved by hiring adjunct instructors on a part-time basis.
Purdue began its graduate creative writing program in 1987, first granting MA degrees and later becoming an MFA program. By the time its MFA shuttered, there were only three students in the program, down from two dozen, in fiction and poetry. Until recently the program had six tenure-track professors, but that number had recently shrunk to three; those professors, including Leung, will continue to teach undergraduates at Purdue.
Kerry Cohen, program director of the Red Earth MFA, says she doesn’t know the “real reason” behind that program’s shutdown, which was announced in February. “There is some sort of initiative at the university that is clouded in corporate language where they’re moving more toward degrees that lead directly to moneymaking careers,” she says. “But there’s clearly more than that behind it, because of the way they blindsided us and gave us no chance to respond or make changes.”
Red Earth, founded in 2010, is still in its teach-out period, allowing current students to finish their degrees. The all-online program—which did not offer scholarships or other funding to students on tracks in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction—won’t officially close until August 2026. Still, Cohen says, students are devastated. “They worry about whether an MFA from a program that no longer exists is worth anything,” she says. “Plus, they adore the program and the community they’ve created.”
Cohen says that faculty members will be forced to leave the program as the number of students dwindle, but she is going to try to keep as many people as she can for as long as possible. She also notes that Red Earth faculty members do not rely on their positions as their sole source of income.
“I am sad and angry,” Cohen says. “We feel dismissed. They [university administrators] think of us as frivolous, as people who study and practice something that doesn’t matter. Of course writing matters. All arts do.”
Foos, the Goddard instructor, acknowledges that there may be too many MFA programs—and not enough students to go around. At its height, around a decade ago, Goddard had about 120 students enrolled in its MFA program, says Foos; that number had shrunk during this past semester to about twenty-five, none of whom received financial support. Goddard’s MFA students had at least seven genres to choose from, including libretto and television writing in addition to fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. “All these programs are fighting for [more] students.”
In addition to teaching at Goddard, Foos is on the faculty of the MFA program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she has recently picked up more classes. When the Lesley program was established in 2003, it was one of only a handful of low-residency MFA programs in the United States, Foos notes. Today there are dozens of such programs, which allow students to earn their MFAs mainly through remote coursework. Lesley, as well as Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, has agreed to take in Goddard’s remaining MFA students so they can finish their degrees at those schools if they wish. Students also have the option of transferring elsewhere, and Warren Wilson College, a low-residency MFA program in Swannanoa, North Carolina, is offering Goddard students an application-fee waiver.
The question of whether there are too many MFA programs aside, Josh Russell, director of creative writing at Georgia State, says “something significant” will be lost with the closure of the university’s program, which was founded in 1983. The university’s final eight-student MFA cohort will enter this fall, and Russell expects that the last students will graduate in the spring of 2028. The university’s MFA students have received tuition waivers and stipends to tutor or work on the literary magazine Five Points, along with opportunities for additional funding in their second year.
“Many MFA programs continue to thrive because writers recognize that writing programs can provide communities in which it’s possible to make art, think about art, talk about art, and live as artists,” Russell says.
While Georgia State’s PhD program in creative writing will continue, “that doesn’t completely mitigate the loss of the MFA element of our community,” he says. “We have a history of accomplished graduates, including two recent NEA fellows,” Russell says. He adds that the MFA program has historically attracted more students from underrepresented groups than the PhD program, and he is concerned that closing the MFA will lead to a drop in creative writing enrollment among such students. Georgia State’s five tenure-track and two non-tenure-track creative writing faculty will continue to teach undergraduates and PhD students at the university.
Whether the closures of the past year signal a reversal in the half century of MFA program growth, Russell cannot say. But he suspects they mirror larger cultural shifts. “The trend may be the constant media and popular-culture focus on the monetary value of every degree and the knee-jerk reaction of administrators to that focus,” he says.
Most writers, of course, do not enter an MFA program with expectations of earning a lot of money. According to a 2023 survey by the Authors Guild, a membership organization that advocates for writers, the median annual income full-time authors earn from their books is just $10,000, and their total median earnings from all author-related income is $20,000. But many are attracted to MFA programs by the opportunity to seriously work on their craft for a year or more, sometimes with funding, under the guidance of experienced instructors.
“The pursuit of income is important, but the pursuit of art enriches the student and campus community, and is a crucial investment, even if it doesn’t redound to an immediate profit,” says Leung.
Calvin Hennick is the author of the memoir Once More to the Rodeo (Pushcart Press, 2019), which received the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by Amazon. He is currently working on a graphic novel with his teenage son.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the MFA programs at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier had shut down. In fact, VCFA has not closed its low-residency programs, and the university has in recent years been engaged in ongoing efforts to innovate and sustain its programs.