The Real Value of an Online MFA: Two Expert Perspectives

“It is so tough to define the value of an MFA. So it’s important not to pretend that it’s for everyone or that it’s one-size-fits-all. But I do think for those who have carefully considered it, it is a fit. It really can be a great experience.”

Sarah Wallman, Director of the MFA in Writing at Albertus Magnus College

The master of fine arts (MFA) degree is surprisingly agile for an octogenarian concept. From its origins as a creative writing program in Iowa, first offered in 1940, the MFA is now available from over 250 institutions across the United States. The spread of online learning has made it more accessible than ever.

But it’s changing, too: in particular, the creative writing MFA—which ports itself over to online and low-residency settings much more naturally than MFAs in studio art, media art, or theater—is at a pivot point between maintaining its rigorous artistic origins and adapting to the broader market’s insistent questions. What is today’s MFA worth, what does it cost, and who is it for?

An MFA in creative writing will teach students the craft of creative writing. Beyond that, the promises of the degree are harder to define. When it comes to cost, the MFA’s distant cousin, the master of business administration (MBA), has a clear value proposition: you pay the exorbitant tuition (or, preferably, get your employer to pay for it), then recoup the costs in the increased salary that the MBA credential invites.

With the MFA, the math is much murkier. While it is a terminal degree and may qualify one to teach in a university setting, the tuition (approximately $30,000 at the most affordable programs) is not as easily offset—teaching jobs, which are not largely remunerative, are far from assured. Marketwide, demand for creative writers remains low, while the large number of MFA graduates keeps supply persistently inflated.

From an institutional point of view, the economics are more persuasive: online and low-residency MFA programs have low infrastructure costs, high tuition tolerance, and strong branding upside. But they face headwinds from upstart non-degree alternatives and challenges in recreating all the benefits of traditional, in-person programs.

Creative writing MFAs do indeed port well to the online and low-residency format: words on the page are easily represented on the screen; disembodied heads on Zoom substitute well enough for embodied heads around an elongated table. But there are meaningful differences between online (or low-residency) MFAs and their traditional, in-person counterparts, which help delineate who these programs are for and how the costs are recouped.

Historically, the creative writing MFA was a selective finishing school: a competitive classroom of 12 to 15 seats, some of which were fully funded, for writers who wanted to sharpen their craft at an elite level. Today’s online and low-res programs are much more accessible. While they still strive to offer all that an in-person MFA does—craft development, mentorship, structure, and network—they broaden the net of applicants to include those from non-writing backgrounds, as well as people who might not be able to give up their working salary to attend a full-time program.

“The MFA is for many more people than it used to be,” says Joe Baumann, PhD, department head for the MFA in writing at Lindenwood University. “It’s for anybody who is invested in learning more about writing: both what craftsmanship is, and who they are as a writer.”

That expansion of access comes with trade-offs. Online and low-res MFAs generally can’t offer their students part-time teaching jobs as a way to offset tuition costs. Digital workshops approximate but don’t replicate the community bonding of their in-person versions. A mix of synchronous and asynchronous learning fractures cohort cohesion further.

And at the larger online MFA programs (Lindenwood is one of the largest in the country, with around 250 students), developing the type of tight-knit network that MFA students once relied upon to connect to the publishing world is, logistically, much harder.

“Tying in students to larger artist networks and publishing networks is one of the toughest things for us to do,” Baumann says. “I don’t think we’re bad at it. We do what we can. But by default, it’s a challenging set of parameters.”

The pursuit of arts education has always been a form of rebuke to capitalism’s zeroes and ones, but online MFAs still represent a steep out-of-pocket investment: you’re not getting a Pell Grant, you’re probably not getting a scholarship or stipend, and you’re almost certainly not getting an employer to cover the costs. Every dollar spent on an online MFA needs to be earned back.

Meanwhile, the literary marketplace has never been more competitive. Many MFA graduates end up working non-arts-related jobs, where the MFA tuition can be measured in hours that may need to be spent not writing.

“The main value proposition of an MFA isn’t financial,” says Sarah Wallman, director of the MFA in writing at Albertus Magnus College. “That’s a pretty big elephant in the room. As a faculty member and one of the creators of the program [at Albertus Magnus], I’m really careful in counseling students not to get in over their heads.”

In the rapidly vanishing past, an MFA was a stepping stone to teaching creative writing. Today, it’s not, by itself, enough: universities want candidates who not only have MFAs but also strong publishing histories. Demand for these types of jobs hugely outstrips supply. Assistant professorships have been likened to Supreme Court appointments. Tight federal funding and a presidential administration hostile to both higher education and the arts in general make the problem worse. Recent MFA grads need to look elsewhere when calculating how to pay the cost of their tuition.

“We offer a course called Literary Marketplace,” Wallman says. “It’s a professional course that covers practical things: how to make a website, how write a query letter for an agent. It also explores what self-publishing looks like and how people make money doing that. It can be done. But man, it’s a full-time job.”

The arithmetic around the value of the MFA has led to a sharp rise in alternative programs. Online workshops like Tony Tulathimutte’s CRIT, the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop offer one-off courses that, to varying extents, approximate the depth and rigor of different aspects of the typical MFA program. If a prospective student’s goal is simply learning craft and building a network of colleagues, then these programs are a bargain: many are taught by MFA faculty members and award-winning authors, available remotely, and offered at a fraction of the MFA’s price. Even if the goal is publication, the numbers can skew in favor of these alternatives: since its inception less than 10 years ago, about 30 of the roughly 300 CRIT alumni have signed book deals.

Recently, there’s been an uptick in independent workshops run by individual authors (perhaps to pay back their tuition?), as well as workshop series curated by literary journals and presses like Kenyon Review, Tin House, and One Story (perhaps to cover operational costs in a tough economy for the arts?). These programs are typically of short duration and can cover very niche topics. Like any alternative program, they vary in structure, value, and quality. Stitched together, they can provide a Frankensteined MFA, one built to the needs of an emerging author—but they can’t recreate the structure and breadth of traditional academic programming.

“A lot of times, [one-off courses and online workshops] are arguably the best place to start,” Wallman says. “It’s much more modular. You can take pieces. But you do get more continuity with the actual MFA degree program. It’s less mix and match, but in some ways it’s more coherent.”

When you sign up for an MFA, you are, to use a phrase that’d be slashed with most creative writing instructors’ ballpoint pens, making an investment in yourself. The structure, the deadlines, and even the immense cost are guardrails to keep oneself accountable: they declare that your art matters, and your dedication to improving your craft is worthy of time and cash. A multi-year commitment, such as the online MFA program, can equip a student with the attitude and habits needed to sustain a daily practice long after graduation.

“Anything that gives people who want to write an opportunity to do that, and to work with other writers, is a good thing,” Baumann says. “But if you’re looking for a more long-term kind of opportunity, one that has a baked-in writing and literary community that can also teach you how to find more of that after the program is over, that’s where the value of online and low-res MFA is.”

The specter of word-spewing LLMs casts a long, depressing shadow over any discussion related to the future of anything related to creative writing. On one hand, the value of well-crafted human prose has never been more apparent; on the other, the broader market’s demand for it has never felt smaller. The desire, however, to be able to tell one’s story—not to get too hippy-dippy—might be enduring and universal.

“There’s a big group of people who consciously want to write a book, but really have no idea how to manifest that,” Wallman says. “MFA programs really do help. Instruction is one thing. But it’s also the community you build, the reading you do, the way you’re forced to think about craft critically, and just the bare fact of deadlines: you have to do it, so you do it.”

Institutionally, online and low-res MFAs are more resilient than more traditional forms of arts education. They’re less vulnerable to the turbulence in federal funding and generate relatively consistent revenue streams for their parent universities.

From an enrollment perspective, the picture’s rosy: Lindenwood’s MFA program is larger than some MBA programs, and even Albertus Magnus, one of the smallest online MFAs, has consistently topped up its MFA cohort at 12 and 15 students, which Wallman calls the ‘sweet spot.’

“We are continuing to see more and more people interested in studying writing at the graduate level,” Baumann says. “The MFA itself is not going away, but what kinds of MFAs institutions decide are sustainable will keep changing.”

The online MFA is different from its traditional counterpart in structure and delivery. But it’s also changing the way writing is taught and considered. Baumann notes how, just a decade or two ago, the concept of “The MFA Story” connoted both the type of writing an MFA produced and the type of writing necessary to get in: a sort of literary realism that harkened back to the early days of Iowa. But today, more MFA programs are leaning, excitedly, into genre writing.

“The MFA is no longer for a very specific kind of writer,” Baumann says. “The sphere of who an MFA is for is growing, and that’s a good thing.”

The cost of an MFA is quantifiable. Its value is harder to pin down. This is how it’s always been with arts education, and especially the MFA: from one angle it’s profane, an elitist’s luxury credential, a foolish investment for spoiled brats; in a different light it’s holy, a pure pursuit, resistant to any assignment of value with decimal points and dollar signs.

“It is so tough to define the value of an MFA,” Sarah says. “So it’s important not to pretend that it’s for everyone or that it’s one-size-fits-all. But I do think for those who have carefully considered it, it is a fit. It really can be a great experience.”