The Poets & Writers Magazine rankings do not use the above polling data to create a weighting system for the overall rankings. There is a presumption that applicants' own application lists best reflect the extent to which they take into account funding, location, reputation, selectivity, faculty, curriculum, and other applicant-specific factors in choosing which programs to apply to and attend.

Were the above data used to create a weighting system for the rankings, many of the nation's most prominent and popular programs would drop from the top fifty rankings altogether. The result would be a series of rankings that poorly reflected the present national consensus on program quality. For instance, under the rankings' current methodology a popular but largely-unfunded MFA program in a major urban center might still appear in the top fifty rankings because even a low standing in the funding, selectivity, student-faculty, fellowship placement, and job placement categories can be counterbalanced by a program's popularity due to location and/or faculty. The popularity of a program's location and faculty is best reflected by privileging applicants' application lists rather than a confluence of these lists and publicly-accessible hard data. To redesign the overall rankings as something other than a direct reflection of current applicant mores would be to ensure that virtually no nonfully funded and/or big-city programs (with only a handful of exceptions) would appear in the overall top fifty rankings, nor many (if any) nonfully funded programs whose appeal lies in large part in the composition of their faculty rosters.

While it’s fair to assume that program popularity going forward may be directly affected by a high or low standing in the funding, selectivity, fellowship-placement, and job-placement rankings, the pace of this trend is arrested, rather than hastened, by the current ranking methodology. If the top fifty programs were ordered according to a weighted ranking system that calculated hard data regarding program funding, selectivity, student-faculty ratio, fellowship placement,and job placement, most large urban programs would drop from the top fifty rankings immediately. The present methodology both registers the relative decline or stagnation in the popularity of certain such programs while allowing for these programs to improve their funding, selectivity, student-faculty ratio, and placement statistics before losing their positions, by applicant consensus, in the top fifty altogether.

Genre of Poll Respondents
Asked in 2010, using a Google-sponsored polling application, “What is your primary genre?”, 701 poll respondents from The Creative Writing MFA Blog provided the following responses:

1. Fiction (53 percent)
2. Poetry (28 percent)
3. Nonfiction (15 percent)
4. Other (2 percent)

Isolating only the 578 poetry and fiction respondents to the above poll question, the results are as follows:

1. Fiction (65 percent)
2. Poetry (35 percent)

This suggests that the potential polling cohort at The Creative Writing MFA Blog is similar in its constitution, in terms of genre affiliation, to the national MFA-applicant cohort. Hard data from twenty MFA programs with available admissions data for both genres (constituting a total of twenty-four data-sets ranging in age from the 2008–2009 admissions cycle to the 2010–2011 admissions cycle) generates a total data-set of 12,368 applicants, 8,730 of these being fiction applicants (70 percent) and 3,638 poetry applicants (30 percent).

This hard data also bears a close statistical resemblance to the actual polling cohort for the 2012 full-residency MFA rankings: during the time period discussed above, 635 MFA applicants with a declared genre were polled for these rankings, including 398 in fiction (63 percent) and 237 in poetry (37 percent). This said, the disparity between the genre demographics of the actual polling cohort and applicants’ genre demographics as recorded by MFA programs suggests that poets were marginally more likely to participate in the present rankings’ program-popularity polling than were fiction writers. Specifically, the actual polling cohort contains 10 percent fewer fiction writers than a fully representative sample would have included. While some substantial portion of this disparity is explained by the margin of error presumptively generated by Google-sponsored polling apparatuses and the relative paucity of two-genre statistical breakouts (only 10 percent of all full-residency MFA programs have such data available from any of the past three admissions cycles), it is nevertheless clear that the present polling under-samples fiction writers by approximately 5 percent. Analysis of existing polling data reveals, however, that such under-sampling has a negligible effect on the final overall rankings. Even those few programs that are substantially more popular among fiction writers than poets could expect to see at most only a one- to three-spot increase in their overall ranking were the actual polling cohort for the rankings fully representative of the national applicant pool in terms of genre affiliation.

Of course, no full-residency graduate creative writing program advertises its fiction, poetry, or nonfiction tracks as being of any more or less importance to its reputation than any other genre track, so an equally valid methodology for the fiction- and poetry-focused overall rankings would be to use a polling demographic equally divided between fiction writers and poets. The present methodology essentially charts a middle course between this option and a fully national-pool-representative polling cohort.

Poll respondents for the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings were self-selected, and it is the particular and express design of the rankings’ methodology that the polling cohort for these rankings be self-selected. Just as a poll aimed at determining popular car manufacturers might use a self-selecting polling cohort to only compile the responses of the best-researched car buyers—for instance, those who had spent time on websites that allow consumers to compare various available car brands and styles—these rankings do not intend to sample a generic cohort of MFA applicants. Instead, it is the aim of the rankings to primarily if not exclusively catalogue application decisions made by the best-researched MFA applicants (see “Full-Residency Rankings: Polling Locus [11]”).

National Full-Residency Applicant Pool Size
The frequency with which each full-residency MFA program appeared on polled fiction and poetry applicants' application lists was determined by dividing the number of votes for a particular program in both fiction and poetry by the total number of applicants in these two genres polled during the 2010–2011 admissions cycle (640). Because recent applicant-pool hard data is available for thirty-nine full-residency MFA programs, a function of these two data-points was used to estimate the total national full-residency applicant pool in fiction and poetry for the 2010–2011 admission cycle. While such an extrapolation presumes that the users of The Creative Writing MFA Blog were and are demographically similar to those individuals who did not use The Creative Writing MFA Blog to research programs during the polling period (and that those who cast votes on The Creative Writing MFA Blog were demographically similar to those who were patrons but did not), this sampling was used because (1) demographic data for all full- and low-residency applicants is not known or knowable, and (2) there is no particular reason to suspect dramatic demographic differences between the various subgroups cited above, as The Creative Writing MFA Blog is a public website easily accessible by networked computer. Likewise, because user accounts allow website patrons to manage the amount of personal information they release to the public, there is no particular reason for any subset of applicants to feel chilled from casting a vote for whichever programs they favor. While the general tenor of discourse on The Creative Writing MFA Blog is consistent with the applicant-demographic polling described above—for instance, the blog constitutes a community that generally favors more selective over less selective programs, higher-ranked programs over lower-ranked ones, programs with better student-faculty ratios over those with worse, programs in cities and towns popular among younger Americans versus those in less talked-about locales, funded over unfunded programs, and programs with a longer duration over those with a shorter one—these attitudes are consistent with that present conventional wisdom expounded upon at length in most media accounts of the creative writing MFA, as well as the sort of advice about important program features that college creative writing professors give to their MFA-aspirant students every day. There appears to be nothing remarkable about the demographics of those who patronize a free, public, lightly-moderated website like The Creative Writing MFA Blog.

In an open letter published online in 2009, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) estimated that there are "more than 13,000 applicants to [full- and low-residency] MFA programs each year." Data collected for the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings indicate that this estimate is almost certainly incorrect. While no one knows for certain the total number of applicants annually to full-residency programs in the United States, based on the available data the present median estimate for this figure is 2,797. The mean estimate is 3,253; subtracting the two lowest and two highest outliers from the thirty-nine program-based data-points available results in an “adjusted mean” of 3,042. Similar calculations conducted during the 2009–2010 admissions cycle produced similar results: a median of 3,116; a mean of 3,478; and an adjusted mean (dropping the one lowest and one highest outlier from a data-set including sixty-three program-based data-points) of 3,276. These numbers suggest that the 2011 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings polled more than 15 percent of the annual applicant pool to full-residency MFA programs, and that the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings have now polled more than 20 percent of this population.

As noted in the introductory article for the 2011 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings ("The MFA Revolution: Ranking the Nation's Best Programs," Poets & Writers Magazine, September/October 2010), while the Poets & Writers Magazine rankings are not scientific, they are probative. Whereas scientific rankings (which require demographic data that is, in this case, unavailable both to independent researchers and national trade organizations) traditionally poll, at the state level, well less than a hundredth of one percent of their target population, and national polls typically sample well less than a thousandth of one percent, the sample size for the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings, in a nod to the necessarily unscientific nature of the polling, is between 2,000 and 20,000 times larger as a percentage of population.

To arrive at this year’s national applicant-pool estimates, the following equation was used:

(640 divided by the number of fiction and poetry votes received by a program in 2010–2011 applicant polling) multiplied by (the number of fiction and poetry applicants reported by that program during the 2010–2011 admissions cycle)

Using the equation above, it was determined that twenty-six of the thirty-nine program-data-based estimates for the annual full-residency applicant pool (67 percent) fell within approximately 1,000 applicants of the above-cited mean of 2,797, and 32 estimates (82 percent) fell within 1,500.

The popularity of programs whose extrapolated national-applicant-pool estimates significantly exceed the adjusted mean may well be undertabulated (ranked lower than what they would have been had the entire national applicant pool been polled) by the polling done for the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings; conversely, programs whose extrapolated applicant-pool estimates fall significantly below the adjusted mean may well be overtabulated (ranked higher than what they would have been had the entire national applicant pool been polled). These undertabulations and overtabulations are not random; they reflect the fact that those applicants less likely to have been exposed to the present conventional wisdom regarding MFA applications on sites like The Creative Writing MFA Blog are consequently more likely to apply to short-duration, poorly-funded programs in high cost-of-living urban areas. The current conventional wisdom among the online-researching MFA applicant community is that it is advisable to apply to longer-duration, well-funded programs in lower cost-of-living areas. To the extent the polling conducted at The Creative Writing MFA Blog favors better-funded programs or programs that boast some of the qualities referenced earlier in this section, this statistical phenomenon is a conscious mirror-imaging of the general preferences of the best-researched MFA applicants, not an inadvertent byproduct of the rankings' methodology.

Of the ten programs listed below with the highest upward deviation from the adjusted mean—that is, the programs most likely to have been undertabulated by this ranking—not one is fully-funded. Only one is even half fully-funded. Only two of ten are three years in duration; one, in fact, is only a single year in duration. More than half are located in one of four high-cost-of-living locales: Boston, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

Of the twenty programs with the largest downward deviation from the adjusted mean—the programs most likely to have been overtabulated by this ranking—eighteen (90 percent) are fully funded. Of the remaining two programs, one is 70 percent fully funded, and one is an Honorable Mention selection in the funding category and has of late widely advertised its ongoing push to better fund matriculants. Of these twenty programs, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) are three years in duration, and two others (10 percent) offer a substantial percentage of each graduating class third-year funding opportunities. Fifteen of the programs (75 percent) are at public universities.

Below are national applicant-pool estimates, derived from the polling data, for the thirty-nine programs with available annual admissions statistics for 2011, ranked from the lowest estimates for the national full-residency applicant pool in fiction and poetry (programs more likely to be overtabulated) to the highest (programs more likely to be undertabulated). To reiterate, the number in parentheses represents an estimate of the total full-residency MFA applicant pool for 2010–2011 based on the percentage of the 640 MFA applicants polled for the Poets & Writers Magazine rankings who voted for that school and the actual number of applications the school reportedly received.

McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana (1,176)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia (1,580)
Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana (1,697)
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (1,758) *
University of South Carolina in Columbia (1,768)
University of California in San Diego (1,824)
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (1,874)
University of Miami in Florida (1,920)
University of Colorado in Boulder (1,996) *
Indiana University in Bloomington (2,116)
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (2,201)
Arizona State University in Tempe (2,352)
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland (2,369)
University of Iowa in Iowa City (2,424)
University of Florida in Gainesville (2,600)
Syracuse University in New York (2,601)
University of Nevada in Las Vegas (2,618)
University of Wisconsin in Madison (2,640)
Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia (2,685) *
University of Mississippi in Oxford (2,797)
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (2,800)
University of Virginia in Charlottesville (2,869)                                                                      
Pennsylvania State University in University Park (2,891) *
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (3,104)
University of Texas in Austin (3,220)
University of Wyoming in Laramie (3,303) *
University of Oregon in Eugene (3,469)
University of California in Irvine (3,491)
Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville (3,576)
New York University in New York City (4,106)
University of Maryland in College Park (4,185)
Colorado State University in Fort Collins (4,221)
University of Montana in Missoula (4,292) *
Hunter College in New York City (4,364) *
George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia (5,007) *
Brooklyn College in New York City (5,493)
Boston University in Massachusetts (5,847)
North Carolina State University in Raleigh (7,200)                                  
San Francisco State University in California (10,435)

* = Publicly-released applicant-pool data included three genres. A two-genre estimate—using the national-average 6:3:2 distribution of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction applications—has been used to generate this extrapolated figure.

The variation in the figures above reflects the differing practices of applicants who conduct substantial research into programs via online MFA-applicant communities and those who do not. The list reflects that, for example, Boston University in Massachusetts is probably more popular among the total national applicant pool than it is among the 640 users polled on The Creative Writing MFA Blog. That the Iowa Writers' Workshop, whose reputation and name-recognition in the field of graduate creative writing is the most likely of any program to be equivalent across all applicant groups, is only 350 or so applicants off the median national applicant-pool estimate of 2,797 suggests that the Writers' Workshop was one of the most "neutrally-tabulated" programs in these rankings—as no obvious reason exists for individual groups of applicants to be more or less familiar with the much-lauded seventy-five-year-old program. Other programs within one standard deviation of the median include the well-known, longstanding programs at Brown University (0 percent off the median), University of Virginia (3 percent), Hollins University (4 percent), Syracuse University (7 percent), and University of Michigan (11 percent).

The mean for the above estimates is 3,253, and the “adjusted mean” (calculated by dropping the two lowest and two highest outliers) is 3,042.

As the annual applicant-pool estimates provided above relate only to fiction and poetry applications, the traditional 6:3:2 genre ratio (see “Genre Rankings: Cohort”; approximately 18.1 percent of all MFA applicants nationally are nonfiction applicants, though among the applicant community at The Creative Writing MFA Blog this figure is 15.3 percent) can be used to estimate the median and mean number of nonfiction applicants per annum: 622 (the median; in 2010 this was 567), 723 (the mean; in 2010 this was 632), and 676 (the adjusted mean; in 2010 this was 596). These figures are derived directly from the median, mean, and adjusted mean calculations for full-residency fiction and poetry programs recited above.

The above nonfiction applicant-pool estimates cross-check, broadly speaking, with estimates extrapolated from programs with known recent admissions data for nonfiction: University of Iowa (whose 2011 admissions figures produce an estimate of 278 annual applications in nonfiction nationwide); University of Wyoming in Laramie (2010 figures: 253); Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York (2006: 561); and Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey (2010: 842). Further confirmation is provided by programs whose three-genre applicant-pool sizes are known but for which a breakdown by genre is unavailable. The nonfiction applicant pool for these programs can be estimated using the national-average 6:3:2 ratio, and this estimate can then be used to estimate the national nonfiction applicant pool in the manner described above for poetry and fiction programs. The result is a series of national nonfiction applicant-pool estimates from the following programs’ 2011 admissions data: Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia (127); University of Arizona in Tucson (130); University of North Carolina in Wilmington (208); University of Wyoming in Laramie (217); George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia (260); Pennsylvania State University in University Park (270); University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana (283); University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (291); University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (296); American University in Washington, D.C. (314); Hunter College in New York City (441); University of Colorado in Boulder (477); Ohio State University in Columbus (527); Columbia University in New York City (652); and University of Montana in Missoula (676). The median for these estimates is 291, while the mean is 345.

One issue with this second method of extrapolation is that highly-ranked nonfiction programs are both more likely to have nonfiction-genre statistical “breakouts” available, and more likely to receive a larger percentage of nonfiction applicants than the usual 6:3:2 ratio would suggest. Some of the national nonfiction applicant-pool estimates above are therefore slightly lower than they should be, and this may explain the difference in the two sets of medians and means derived from the two methods of extrapolation described above.

While these estimates cannot fix with certainty the annual nonfiction applicant pool, that every estimate above is between 125 and 725, with a clear majority falling between 250 and 550, suggests that the correct figure is well under a thousand.

Added to the adjusted median and mean data for fiction and poetry, these nonfiction figures suggest an annual three-genre applicant pool, across all full-residency programs in the United States, of 3,088 (median) or 3,597 (mean). A more cautious approach would be to propose a range: The annual three-genre full-residency applicant pool is likely between 3,000 and 3,750, a drop of several hundred from last year’s estimate of 3,500 to 4,000.

Data Sources
For those program measures not subject to applicant polling, such as rankings and recitations of admissions, curricular, placement, student-faculty ratio, and funding data, only data publicly released by the programs—either to individual applicants, to groups of applicants, in a program's promotional literature, or via a program website—have been included in the rankings table. All data were updated regularly to reflect programs' most recent public disclosures. As previously stated, programs can alert Poets & Writers Magazine to important website updates by e-mailing the magazine directly.

Many of the nation's full- and low-residency MFA programs decline to publicly release internal data (see “Ranking Questionnaires and Program Response Rates [12]”). Programs unable or unwilling to release data regarding their funding and admissions processes are necessarily disadvantaged by a ranking system that relies on transparency. Yet no program that fails to release this data for applicants' consideration can avoid being judged, by applicants and other observers, through the lens of such nondisclosures. As research for these rankings is based entirely on publicly-available, publicly-verifiable data, the accuracy of the data upon which the rankings are based can be readily confirmed by any party.

LOW-RESIDENCY RANKINGS
Structure
Low-residency programs were measured in nine categories, seven of which are rankings—five employing unscientific but probative polling of the sort described above, and two based upon publicly-available hard data. Low-residency programs have not been assessed with respect to their funding packages because these programs generally offer no or very little financial aid to incoming students. The reason for this is that low-residency programs presume their applicants will continue in their present employment during the course of their studies.

Cohort
Over the course of four successive application cycles, a total of 230 low-residency applicants were polled as to their program preferences, with these preferences exhibited in the form of application lists. The locus for this polling was the Poets & Writers online discussion board, the Speakeasy Message Forum [13], widely considered the highest-trafficked low-residency community on the Internet. The relatively small cohort used for this polling accounts for the following: (1) The annual applicant pool for low-residency programs is approximately one-eighth the size of the full-residency applicant pool (see “Full-Residency Rankings: National Full-Residency Applicant Pool Size” and “National Low-Residency Applicant Pool Size [14]”); (2) low-residency applicants do not congregate online in the same way or in the same numbers that full-residency applicants do; and (3) low-residency programs are subject to a "bunching" phenomenon not evident with full-residency programs, with only ten programs nationally appearing on even 10 percent of poll respondents' application lists, and only four appearing on 20 percent or more. For this reason only the top ten low-residency programs [4] have been included in the rankings [4] (also available in the September/October 2011 print edition of Poets & Writers Magazine); below this level it is difficult to draw distinctions between programs, as none received a significant number of votes over the four years polling was conducted.

One explanation for the bunching phenomenon described above may be that low-residency programs are less susceptible to comparison than full-residency programs, as many of the major considerations for full-residency applicants, including location, funding, cohort quality, class size, program duration, student-faculty ratio, job placement, and cost of living, are not major considerations for low-residency applicants due to the structure and mission of low-residency programs. Generally speaking, low-residency programs are assessed on the basis of their faculty and pedagogy, neither of which are conducive to quantification and ranking. That three programs have such a clear advantage in the rankings on the other forty-six operating in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and China is a function of both the relatively recent development of the low-residency model (with older programs tending to be more highly regarded, though none dates to before 1976) and the consensus that appears to have existed for years that three programs in particular are strongest in terms of faculty, selectivity, and placement. It is worth noting, too, that a significant number of the world's forty-nine low-residency MFA programs were founded within the last eight to ten years (see “The Full-Residency Rankings Chart: Additional Program Measures: Dates of Establishment,” below); applicant familiarity with these programs may still be relatively low.

The four-year low-residency polling described above has been further broken down into year-by-year poll results. The cohort for the 2010–2011 annual ranking was thirty-five, for the 2009–2010 annual ranking eighty-eight, for the 2008–2009 ranking fifty-five, and for the 2007–2008 ranking fifty-two. If and when individual Speakeasy account-holders applied to programs in more than one admissions cycle, their application lists from each cycle were treated as separate slates of votes; repeat applicants accounted for less than 10 percent of the polling cohort, however. Full-residency applicants on The Creative Writing MFA Blog who applied to one or more low-residency programs as part of their overall slate of target programs (see "Structure" and "Cohort") were also included in the low-residency voting; due to the exceedingly small number of such votes, these entries were manually compared both to one another and to existing low-residency application lists to ensure duplicate lists were avoided.

While polls with larger cohorts are, all other things being equal, more reliable than those with smaller ones, the fact that the annual applicant pool for low-residency programs is likely between 350 and 400 (see “National Low-Residency Applicant Pool Size [14]”) suggests that the total polling cohort for the 2012 low-residency MFA rankings likely represents approximately 50 percent of a single-year national applicant pool for this sort of degree program. Moreover, as is the case with the full-residency rankings, cross-checking applicant vote totals across a period of four years reveals substantial consistency in the results and quickly unearths any significant anomalies or outliers. Of the ten low-residency programs listed in this year's print rankings, eight (80 percent) ranked in the top ten in all four years of polling, while another was in the top ten for three of the four application cycles studied. All of the programs in the top ten achieved at least an Honorable Mention (a ranking between eleven and fifteen) for all four of the years in which low-residency applicants were polled. In fact, only one current top ten low-residency program has ever ranked lower than twelfth in any individual admissions cycle since 2006 (and even this occurred in only one admissions cycle).

An n.d. notation signifies that a program has not released the requisite data. An em-dash (—) indicates that the program is unranked in that category. Only nine of the nation’s forty-nine low-residency MFA programs achieved a positive score in the national placement rankings, which considered placement data for full- and low-residency programs in a single assessment (and which then, as to the low-residency programs, combined the data for fellowship and job placement into a single table): University of Alaska in Anchorage; Bennington College in Vermont; Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont; Murray State University in Kentucky; Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina; University of Southern Maine in Portland; Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky; Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier; and Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina.

In order to better acknowledge the achievement, in the placement category, of these nine low-residency programs relative to their low-residency peers, and in recognition of the fact that low-residency graduates are substantially less likely to seek postgraduate fellowships or even postgraduate university teaching positions (largely because they do not give up their present employment when they matriculate), the national placement data collected for these rankings have been reconstituted as a low-residency-only ranking.

Due to the still relatively small number of low-residency programs in the United States and abroad, only programs receiving top ten placement in any category of assessment have received a special notation in either the print or online editions of the rankings.

National Low-Residency Applicant Pool Size
A realistic estimate of the annual number of low-residency MFA applicants is four hundred. This estimate is based in part on the fact that the five most-applied-to low-residency programs receive an average of 144 total applications during the 2009–2010 admissions cycle; in contrast, the five most-applied-to full-residency programs received an average of 1,137 fiction and poetry only applications during the same admissions cycle. If this comparison is any guide, approximately eight times as many individuals apply to full-residency programs as low-residency programs each year, suggesting a mean low-residency applicant pool, per year, of between 350 and 400. This figure can then be cross-checked using the number of votes for Warren Wilson College in the present low-residency rankings (95), the total number of low-residency votes cast for the rankings (230), and Warren Wilson's publicly-released annual applicant pool size (200). Using these figures one would expect an annual national low-residency applicant pool of 484. Of the three low-residency programs most highly visible nationally, and therefore the most likely to be neutrally tabulated by these rankings, data is also available, in addition to Warren Wilson College, for Bennington College (whose data suggest an estimated 487 annual low-residency applicants).

In view of the above, the four-year, 230-person sample used for this year's low-residency rankings likely represents approximately one-half of an annual applicant cohort for this type of residency program.

Added to the adjusted mean for annual full-residency poetry, fiction, and nonfiction applicants, the estimate for the annual number of low-residency applicants suggests a total annual applicant pool to creative writing MFA programs—across all genres and types of residency, and gauging discrete applicants only—of somewhere between 3,500 and 4,250. As noted above, this estimate is significantly different from the estimate provided to the public by AWP in 2009 (“[there are] more than 13,000 applicants to MFA programs each year”).

GENRE RANKINGS
Cohort
Between April 16, 2010, and April 15, 2011, 398 fiction applicants were polled for the fiction-genre rankings, 237 poetry applicants were polled for the poetry-genre rankings, and 62 nonfiction applicants were polled for the nonfiction-genre rankings (the total polling cohort for the nonfiction rankings is 163, however, representing a three-year, three-admissions-cycle cohort). The reason for the disparity between the total number of fiction and poetry applicants in the genre-specific polls (635) and the total number of votes in the overall fiction and poetry poll (640) is that five applicants, or less than 1 percent of the cohort polled in fiction and poetry, did not specify their genre—though it was clear from their application lists that the genre in which they applied could not have been nonfiction (due to the fact that the majority of MFA programs do not offer nonfiction tracks, an applicant specifying that he or she has applied in only genre, but who lists certain programs on his or her application list, can be precluded from consideration as a nonfiction applicant). One consequence of this less-than-1 percent nongenre-reporting population is that it is statistically possible for programs to be tied in the overall rankings even when, by virtue of their rankings in the two major genres, it would seem to be a statistical impossibility.

The cohort sizes used in this polling are roughly consistent with the national distribution of MFA applicants by genre, as revealed by those few programs that both (1) accept applicants in all three genres, and (2) release their internal admissions data for all three genres. The national distribution of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction applicants is approximately six to three to two, respectively.

Due to the still relatively small number of nonfiction programs in the United States and abroad, only programs receiving top twenty placement in the genre have received a special notation in either the print or online editions of the rankings. No Honorable Mentions have been awarded, for the following reasons: (1) the relatively small number of votes for programs ranked beyond twentieth in the genre, all of which appeared on fewer than 10 percent of nonfiction applicants' application lists; (2) a bunching phenomenon in the nonfiction rankings, such that any presumptive Honorable Mention section of the nonfiction rankings (programs ranked between twenty-one and twenty-five) would run the risk of being almost half the size of the rankings proper; and (3) there would be little statistical distinction (only one vote) between the presumptive Honorable Mention programs and the six programs ranked behind them—a much smaller disparity, out of a total polling cohort of 163, than the three-vote difference between the top fifty and Honorable Mention sections in the 640-cohort full-residency rankings.

Programs without a nonfiction program are designated, in the top fifty rankings, with n/a (not applicable)

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
Special Note on International Programs
The Poets & Writers Magazine MFA rankings have always considered, and will continue to consider, international MFA programs. However, international programs are unlikely to fare well in the overall rankings for several reasons: (1) nearly all non-U.S./non-Canadian graduate creative writing programs are (by U.S. accreditation standards) nonterminal (that is, they are M.Phil, M.St., or MA degrees, as opposed to the terminal MFA degrees considered by the Poets & Writers rankings); (2) non-U.S./non-Canadian applicants are less likely to frequent a U.S./Canadian-focused MFA website like The Creative Writing MFA Blog, and therefore non-U.S./non-Canadian programs are less likely to appear on the application lists of those polled for these rankings (and Canadian applicants applying to Canadian programs may be less likely to patronize The Creative Writing MFA Blog than American applicants applying to American programs); (3) unlike U.S. and Canadian MFA programs, overseas programs are rarely fully funded for nondomestic students (U.S./Canadian MFA programs less frequently distinguish between domestic and international applicants with respect to funding eligibility), and therefore are less likely to be popular amongst the U.S. and Canadian applicants that frequent The Creative Writing MFA Blog; and (4) due to the exceedingly small number of non-U.S. terminal-degree MFA programs now in operation (94 percent of all creative writing MFA programs now extant are located in the United States, and more than half of those in operation outside the United States were founded within the last forty-eight months), programs in Canada and elsewhere simply have fewer entrants into the international MFA system with which to achieve a top fifty standing in a polling-based overall ranking (as compared to in any of the hard-data categories in this assessment: for instance, funding, selectivity, and postgraduate fellowship or job placement).

NON-MFA MASTER'S DEGREE PROGRAMS
Special Note on MA, MPW, M.Phil, and M.St. Programs
Over the past five years, the present MFA rankings project has catalogued several thousand MFA applicants' application lists. One abiding trend is that only a small number of nonterminal master's degree programs in creative writing can frequently be found on application lists otherwise comprised entirely of terminal-degree MFA programs. As only four MA programs presently answer to this description, these four MA programs have been included in the full-residency rankings for terminal-degree creative writing programs. Applicant mores seem to indicate that these programs are now considered on par with MFA programs in overall quality—if not in the critical feature of terminality. Many of those who attend MA programs in creative writing subsequently apply to terminal-degree MFA programs upon graduation.

Two additional programs are included in these rankings despite being MPW (Master's of Professional Writing) programs. The two reasons for these inclusions are (1) the MPW is arguably a terminal degree, though there is little evidence yet on the question of whether or not it enjoys the same regard in the field of creative writing (as to terminality) as the MFA, and (2) as with the four MA programs referenced above, MPW programs on occasion appear on the application lists of applicants who are otherwise applying only to MFA programs. Two other types of nonterminal creative writing master’s degrees, the M.Phil and the Master of Studies (M.St.), are unknown in the United States, are but offered at several universities in the United Kingdom.

Since polling of MFA applicants began on December 15, 2006, the present MFA rankings project (which, as noted throughout this article, focuses its attention almost exclusively on applicants whose application lists are dominated by terminal MFA programs in creative writing) has registered the following polling results for nonterminal master’s degree programs (results through July 25, 2011):

Top Twenty Non-MFA Creative Writing Master’s (MA, MPW, M.Phil, or M.St.) Degrees, 2006–2011
1. University of California in Davis (63)
2. University of Southern California in Los Angeles (10)
3. Western Washington University in Bellingham (9)
4t. Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti (4)
4t. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio (4)                
4t. University of Tennessee in Knoxville (4)
7t. Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas (2)
7t. Ohio University in Athens (2)
7t. University of East Anglia in Norwich, England (2)
7t. University of Louisville in Kentucky (2)
11t. California State University in Sonoma (1)
11t. College of Charleston in South Carolina (1)
11t. Concordia University in Montreal, Canada (1)
11t. Goldsmiths, University of London in England (1)
11t. Oxford University in England (1)
11t. Royal Holloway, University of London in England (1)
11t. University of Exeter in England (1)
11t. University of Kent in Canterbury, England (1)
11t. University of Southampton in England (1)
11t. University of Sussex in Brighton and Hove, England (1)

[N = 85].

The low “N,” which corresponds to the size of the polling cohort, of this ranking, coupled with the extremely long duration of the polling period and the general unlikelihood of finding committed MA applicants in an online community designed for MFA applicants, means that these results should be read and disseminated with extreme caution; the statistical confidence for this listing is still relatively low, though a renewed effort to capture and catalog the application preferences of nonterminal creative writing master’s candidates is presently under way. Still, no substantive conclusions ought be drawn about trends in nonterminal creative writing master’s degree applications on the basis of this polling.

THE FULL-RESIDENCY RANKINGS CHART: ADDITIONAL PROGRAM MEASURES
Dates of Establishment
Reciting the dates of establishment for the nation’s top full-residency MFA programs offers a critical historical context for the rankings themselves, the institutions assessed by the rankings, and the very degree that is the focus of both the rankings and the institutions whose attributes the rankings catalogue. This column of data does not apply to nonterminal, academic master’s programs in creative writing (with or without the option of a creative thesis), which are different in form and function from their terminal-degree, art-school MFA peers.

Previous ranking methodologies have leaned heavily on the somewhat tendentious factor of program visibility. When programs are assessed by individuals already within the system, the natural result is that older programs—whatever their selectivity, financial resources, faculty resources, curriculum, pedagogy, or student outcomes—move to the top of the pack due to their profile advantage. Yet applicants report only limited interest in programs’ historical pedigrees, as pedigree itself is often considered a suspect quantity in the national literary arts community. By publishing, for the first time, the dates of establishment of the nation’s top seventy-five full-residency MFA programs, these rankings permit applicants and other consumers of these data to both disassociate historical pedigree from the distinct question of program quality, while also better understanding the historical context in which the creative writing MFA has achieved such cultural prominence.

Creative writing as an academic discipline originated in the late nineteenth century, yet by January of 1964 there was still only one MFA-conferring graduate creative writing program in the world. In fact, though the first MFAs in any field were granted in the 1920s, and the MFA-conferring Iowa Writers’ Workshop was founded in 1936, the MFA as a degree would have no abiding place in the national literary arts community until the 1980s. The 1940s, 1950s, and much of the 1960s were marked by attempts to find alternative models to the one provided by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: first, in the degree-granting, relatively nonselective, grade-free creative writing program at Black Mountain College, which was founded in the 1930s but had its heyday in the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s; second, in the undergraduate-only creative writing program at Stanford University (founded in 1947 by Wallace Stegner) and other undergraduate programs modeled closely upon this one; and third, in nonterminal MA programs in creative writing founded at a number of institutions, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1946), University of Denver in Colorado (1947), Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1948), Indiana University in Bloomington (1948), University of Florida in Gainesville (1948), and Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia (1960). Some of these latter programs required academic theses of their students rather than creative ones.

Ultimately, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA model became ascendant—after certain of its elements had been experimented with by the types of degree programs listed above—because of a grass-roots campaign by working creative writers (among both faculties and student bodies at various institutions) to gain greater administrative, pedagogical, and creative autonomy from the Academy to which they had previously been attached. Most of the early MFA programs appear to have been founded only after years—in some cases several decades—of struggle between creative writers and university bureaucrats, with the two primary bases for the latter’s objection to the MFA being that it cost much more than the MA to administer (due to the need for greater faculty resources, and the necessity of awarding tuition remission-eligible assistantships to many terminal-degree candidates) and permitted universities less immediate oversight over their resident literary artists. Far from a “cash cow” warmly embraced by U.S. universities, the creative writing MFA was for decades rejected by America’s universities as too exotic, too expensive, and too distant from the traditional academic functions of an American English department.

At the beginning of the 1980s there were still fewer than two dozen creative writing MFA programs in the world. It was not until the turn of the century that the rate of MFA-program creation significantly increased, as indicated by the table below, which catalogues MFA programs’ dates of establishment by decade (as of the writing of this article, well over 80 percent of all MFA programs worldwide had had their dates of establishment tabulated):

MFA Programs Founded, by Decade
1920s: 0
1930s: 1
1940s: 0
1950s: 0
1960s: 11
1970s: 9
1980s: 23
1990s: 29
2000s: 78
2010s: 15 *

* = In the first eighteen months of the decade. At this pace, the 2010s could see the creation of approximately a hundred new MFA programs.

Of the thirty-six programs whose dates of establishment are not considered by this table, preliminary research suggests that approximately twenty-five were founded in the 2000s, six in the 1990s, and five in the 1980s. The conclusion to be drawn from the above data is that the “MFA boom” occurred sometime in the mid-1990s and has not yet abated. Of all the full- and low-residency MFA programs now in existence worldwide, over 75 percent were founded between the early 1990s and the present day.

Funding
Nothing in these rankings' funding assessments is intended to impugn the motives or character of professors, administrators, or staff at any of the nation's graduate creative writing programs. The presumption of these rankings is that all of these groups have and do militate, with varying degrees of success, for more funding for their students—and that, given the choice, every program would choose to be fully funded. Still, there is no question that some programs require virtually no financial outlay by admitted students, and others are institutionally structured to induce students to take out substantial student loans. The rankings take this into account, as funding is an important factor among the current MFA applicant pool when deciding where to apply.

Program funding packages were calculated on the basis of annual cost-of-living-adjusted stipend values for programs with full tuition waivers, and on the basis of annual cost-of-living-adjusted stipend values less annual tuition for programs offering only partial tuition waivers. Programs were further divided into categories on the basis of the percentage of each incoming class offered full funding. "Full funding" is defined as the equivalent of a full tuition waiver and an annual stipend of at least $8,000/academic year. No program offering full funding to less than 100 percent of its incoming class is ranked ahead of any program fully funded for all students. Likewise, no nonfully funded program is ranked ahead of any program in a higher "coverage" bracket. The six coverage brackets acknowledged by the rankings are as follows: "All” (100 percent fully funded); “Nearly All” (90 to 99 percent fully funded); “Most” (60 to 89 percent); “Some” (30 to 59 percent); “Few” (16 to 29 percent); and “Very Few” (0 to 15 percent). All of these percentages refer to the percentage of each annual incoming class that receives a full funding package.

It’s interesting to note that no program fully funding less than 40 percent of its admitted students received a top fifty ranking in the funding category in the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine MFA rankings. Programs whose coverage bracket is sufficiently high to receive a national ranking, and whose stipend is sufficiently high to meet the definition of full funding, but whose specific annual stipends were unknown at the time the rankings were compiled, were ranked last within their respective coverage brackets. Top fifty programs awarded an Honorable Mention in funding are indicated with a star in the print edition of the rankings. In the online-only third and fourth tiers of the overall rankings, the designation "HM" is used instead.

Programs that fully fund 33 percent or more of their admitted students were considered eligible for package averaging. If and when programs meeting this criterion were revealed to offer funding packages of differing value to different students, the total stipend value of all full-funding packages was divided by the number of such packages to determine average annual stipend value. Because some programs do not advertise special funding offerings available only to select students, not every program benefited from this feature of the rankings. Consistent with the structure and conceit of these rankings, programs exhibiting maximum transparency with respect to their promotional materials were most likely to receive a comprehensive assessment of their total funding package.

The funding rankings take into account duration of funding, as programs were ranked for this measure by multiplying average annual package value by the duration of each program in years. The varying amount of tuition charged at individual programs was disregarded, as students receiving full funding do not, by definition, pay tuition.

Applicants should be aware that many programs deduct administrative fees—almost always less than $1,000, and usually less than $500—from their annual stipends. These fees were not considered by the funding rankings. Moreover, some programs offer health insurance to all admitted students and some do not. Programs that offer health insurance to all admitted students include, but are not limited to, the following (programs are listed in order of funding rank): University of Texas in Austin [Michener Center]; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge; Ohio State University in Columbus; University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa; Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg; Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri; Arizona State University in Tempe; Iowa State University in Ames; Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana; University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; McNeese State University in Lakes Charles, Louisiana; Pennsylvania State University in University Park; University of Iowa in Iowa City; University of Wyoming in Laramie; Vanderbilt University in Nashville; University of Wisconsin in Madison; University of Texas in Austin [English Department]; University of Virginia in Charlottesville; University of California in Irvine; University of Oregon in Eugene; University of Central Florida in Orlando; University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey; and Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

Selectivity
As fewer than five full- or low-residency programs nationally publicly release yield data—the percentage of those offered admission to a program who accept their offers and matriculate—the acceptance rate figures used for the national selectivity ranking are necessarily yield-exclusive. Most have been calculated using the simplest and most straightforward method: Taking the size of a program's annual matriculating cohort in all genres and dividing it by the program's total number of annual applications across all genres. Forty of the top fifty programs in selectivity (74 percent, as there are fifty-four programs in the top fifty listing for selectivity) had available admissions data from the 2010–2011 admissions cycle, ten of the top fifty programs in this category (19 percent) most recently released admissions data during the 2009–2010 admissions cycle, and four programs (7 percent) most recently released admissions data during the 2008–2009 admissions cycle or earlier.

The relative paucity of data available for the selectivity rankings—acceptance rates are available for only 112 of the nation’s 200 MFA programs (56 percent)—is attributable to programs' continued reticence in releasing the sort of internal admissions and funding data regularly released by colleges, universities, and most professional degree programs. Hundreds of interviews with MFA applicants between 2006 and 2011 suggest that a program's acceptance rate is one of the top five pieces of information applicants request when researching a graduate creative writing program. Fortunately, all of the top fifty MFA programs have made their annual acceptance rates public either directly or indirectly, along with nineteen of the twenty-five Honorable Mention programs (76 percent).

In order to avoid artificially privileging small programs with an unknown but likely modest annual yield—programs with small applicant pools but also small incoming cohorts, and consequently, in some instances, extremely low yield-exclusive acceptance rates—only programs receiving more than eighty applications annually were eligible for the top fifty in selectivity. Of the fifty-seven full-residency programs with unknown admissions data, the overall polling done for these rankings suggests that no more than ten would even be eligible for inclusion in the top fifty for selectivity on the basis of their applicant-pool size. Whether these programs' annual incoming cohorts are also sufficiently small—and thus the programs, statistically, sufficiently selective—to make any of these programs entrants into the top fifty for selectivity is unknown. The likelihood is that three or fewer programs that would otherwise appear in the top fifty for selectivity are ineligible for that ranking solely because they have thus far declined to publicly release their admissions data.

Of programs with fewer than eighty applications whose admissions data are known, the ten most selective programs are as follows: Florida International University in Miami, #1; University of Kansas in Lawrence, #2; Northern Michigan University in Marquette, #3; Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, #4; West Virginia University in Morgantown, #5; University of Missouri in Saint Louis, #6; Temple University in Philadelphia, #7; Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia, #8; Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles, #9; and University of Central Florida in Orlando, #10. These program rankings are provisional; admissions data for low-volume MFA programs cannot be considered as probative as data for programs with larger applicant pools.

The small number of low-residency programs with publicly-accessible acceptance rates makes crafting a selectivity ranking for such programs difficult. Of the eighteen programs (37 percent of all low-residency programs) with available data, two-thirds have available admissions data only from the 2007–2008 admissions cycle or earlier. Fortunately, the programs ranked first, second, and third in this measure (and in the other hard-data and polling measures) have all released data from one of their past three admissions cycles. The applicant-pool-size cutoff for inclusion in the low-residency selectivity rankings is set at forty annual applicants.

Fellowship Placement
Programs' postgraduate fellowship placement records were assessed by determining how many individual "placement events" a given program's current students or (much more commonly) graduates achieved during the decade from 2001 to 2011. Only a limited number of fellowships and residencies are available to MFA graduates while in-program or immediately postgraduation, and fewer still are specifically targeted at current MFA students and/or recent MFA graduates. Most of these make publicly available the names and biographical data of their fellows and residents. The focus for this year's fellowship placement rankings was on sixteen of the fellowships and residencies in this group—generally speaking, the nation's sixteen most prestigious mid-MFA/post-MFA fellowships and residencies.

The fellowships and residencies surveyed for this measure were the following: The Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California; the Wisconsin Creative Writing Institute Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison; the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University in New Jersey; the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship in Atlanta; the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; the Axton Fellowship at University of Louisville in Kentucky; the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York; the Bennett Fellowship/Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire; the James Merrill Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut; the Amy Clampitt Residency Award at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, Massachusetts; the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowships (“Waiterships”) at Middlebury College in Vermont; the Gettysburg Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships granted by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago; the Sewanee Writers’ Conference Fellowships at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee (including Borchardt, Dakin, Elkin, Justice, McCorkle, Nemerov, Ralston, Sewanee, Taylor, Van Duyn, Wall, and Williams Scholars/Fellows); and the Steinbeck Fellowship for Fiction-Writers at the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University in California.

These sixteen fellowships and residencies played host to 625 placement events between 2001 and 2011. As the placement rankings acknowledge placement events rather than placed fellows or residents, it is possible for a single fellow or resident to be the subject of more than one placement event.

As simply ranking programs by the number of their students or graduates subject to placement events between 2001 and 2011 would unfairly favor larger programs (which naturally have more graduates on the fellowship market annually), programs have instead been ranked on the basis of a placement score, calculated as follows: A program's total number of placement events between 2001 and 2011 was divided by the size of the program's annual incoming cohort. The resulting top fifty size-adjusted scores ranged from 2.80 to 0.13. In several instances, programs identical both in size and in their number of placement events received scores resulting in rankings "ties"; where possible, ties were broken by privileging the program with the higher number of total placement events. Programs founded during the assessment period had their scores pro-rated on the basis of how many years (out of the last ten) they had had graduated students on the postgraduate fellowship market.

Because fellowships and residencies draw no distinction between full- and low-residency programs, this is the only measure in which full- and low-residency programs were ranked in a single measure. This said, the low-residency programs were subsequently granted their own numerical ranking, in recognition of the fact that these programs are hampered by the decreased likelihood that their graduates will seek fellowships or residencies in the first instance (as by definition low-residency students already have full- or part-time employment).

These fellowship placement rankings should be used with caution. As selection for a fellowship or residency is often the result of one or more individuals being the "consensus pick(s)" of a panel of judges—and as consensus in art has not always, historically, favored innovation—it is possible for fellows and residents to in some instances be amongst the most talented, but not necessarily the most innovative, of their graduating year's national cohort. This is by no means to impugn, or remark upon, the writing of any particular fellow or resident, or on the selections of any particular fellowship or residency. Instead, the emphasis in this caveat is on causation: Applicants should not presume either that a program with a high placement ranking can ensure them a fellowship or residency, nor that a program with a high placement ranking necessarily hosts the strongest student cohort if innovation, rather than technical mastery, is the particular interest of the applicant. On these points the rankings make no specific claim other than to note these important distinctions.

Job Placement
Between 2008 and 2011, the most popular online discussion board for creative writing job-seekers pursuing full-time employment at the university level, The Academic Jobs Wiki, listed 207 full-time positions available for poets and fiction writers. Data on the individuals ultimately hired for these openings was available for 145 of these 207 listings (70 percent). Searches conducted over consecutive years due to budget freezes were only counted as a single listing. Based on research into the educational credentials of the individuals ultimately hired for these positions, a ranking was created to indicate which graduate creative writing programs’ alumni enjoyed the most success on the academic job market over these three hiring cycles. The following figures may be of academic interest to those tracking employment opportunities for creative writers in higher education:

2008–2009 Hiring Season: Sixty-eight positions available (hire information available for 62 percent); male/female split for those positions with available data for final fires was 57 percent female, 43 percent male.

2009–2010 Hiring Season: Eighty-four positions available, ten of which were holdovers from the previous year (i.e., cancelled or frozen searches from the previous year); hire information available for 52 percent; male/female split for those positions with available data for final hires was 57 percent female, 43 percent male.

2010–2011 Hiring Season: Seventy-five positions available, eight of which were holdovers from the previous year (i.e., cancelled or frozen searches from the previous year); hire information available for 79 percent; male/female split for those positions with available data for final hires was 51 percent male, 49 percent female.

Given that the nation’s two hundred full- and low-residency MFA programs, and thirty-two doctoral programs in creative writing, graduate more than two thousand poets and two thousand fiction writers every year, along with between five hundred and a thousand nonfiction writers (some of whom have qualifications and prior publications in fiction and/or poetry), the data above suggests that each year full-time teaching positions at the university level are available for, on average, well less than 1 percent of graduate creative writing program alumni. Even if graduates were only required to compete for employment against those in their own annual cohort, and even assuming only between 10 and 20 percent of nonfiction program graduates can or do compete for positions advertised for poetry and/or fiction, this figure would be less than 2 percent. Realistically, however, each year’s graduate creative writing program alumni are competing against an ever-increasing stock of unemployed, underemployed, and employed-but-still-job-hunting alumni from previous years.

While polling suggests that only about half of the nation’s creative writing program graduates wish to teach, even this statistic cannot bring an individual degree-holding poet or writer’s employment chances (all things being equal) higher than, at best, 4 percent. Consequently, those graduate creative writing programs with the best track records in terms of job placement—the top ten programs in this measure achieved full-time job-placement rates, during the period assessed, of between 8 and 20 percent—are offering to students significant value-added as they pursue postgraduate employment. Whether higher job placement rates at certain schools are due to stronger alumni networks, better career placement services, better teaching, or simply better students is unclear, though there appears to be a high correlation between a program’s standing in this measure and its standing in other indicia of average cohort quality.

Student-Faculty Ratio
Using data on individual programs’ total student-body sizes, along with recitations of full-time core faculty in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from the Poets & Writers online MFA database, student-faculty ratios were calculated for the 122 full-residency MFA programs (81 percent of all such programs) with both sets of data available. Tiebreakers in student-faculty ratio were awarded (where necessary and where possible) to the program with the higher number of total core faculty members. Note that this ranking, unlike others in the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine MFA rankings, takes into account any and all fiction, poetry, and nonfiction faculty and students at individual programs, not merely faculty and students in the former two genres. Along with the top fifty programs in this measure, ten Honorable Mention distinctions were awarded, owing to the large number of programs eligible for (and assessed for) this measure.

Student-faculty ratio is treated, here, as a presumptively rankable program quality. Just as a large percentage of applicants report that they prefer, all things being equal, a more selective program, or a better-funded program, or a program that performs better at placing its graduates in fellowships and full-time jobs post-graduation, generally speaking creative writing graduate students prefer a better student-faculty ratio to a worse one—the better to have immediate and meaningful access to those charged with instructing, mentoring, and advising them. The fifty-nine non-top fifty, non-Honorable Mention full-residency MFA programs (as to this measure) are ranked as follows (with ratio in parentheses after each school):

Non-Top 50/Non-Honorable Mention Programs in Student-Faculty Ratio, with Rank and Ratio

64. The New School in New York City (5.14)
65t. Adelphi University in New York City (5.14)
65t. California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (5.14)
67. Florida State University in Tallahassee (5.46)
68. Texas State University in San Marcos (5.50)
69. University of California in Irvine (5.50)
70t. Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga (5.63)
70t. University of Colorado in Boulder (5.63)
70t. University of New Hampshire in Durham (5.63)
73t. University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (5.71)
73t. University of Maryland in College Park (5.71)
75. Georgia State University in Atlanta (5.83)
76. University of Houston in Texas (6.00)
77. University of Massachusetts in Boston (6.00)
78t. Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven (6.00)
78t. University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Canada (6.00)
80. University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg (6.00)
81. Northwestern University in Chicago (6.36)
82. Ohio State University in Columbus (6.43)
83. Portland State University in Oregon (6.50)
84. Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York (6.52)
85. California College of the Arts in Oakland (6.67)
86. University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (6.88)
87t. Queens College, CUNY (7.00)
87t. University of South Florida in Tampa (7.00)
89. Florida International University in Miami (7.14)
90t. University of Baltimore in Maryland (7.20)
90t. University of Nevada at Las Vegas (7.20)
92. University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (7.50)
93. Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton (7.50)
94. Chatham University in Pittsburgh (8.00)
95t. Roosevelt University in Chicago (8.00)
95t. University of Memphis in Tennessee (8.00)
97. Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo (8.33)
98. Oklahoma State University in Stillwater (8.33)
99. Columbia College in Chicago (8.38)
100t. American University in Washington, D.C. (8.57)
100t. Eastern Washington University in Cheney (8.57)
100t. San Diego State University in California (8.57)
100t. University of Massachusetts in Amherst (8.57)
100t. University of Utah in Salt Lake City (8.57)
105. George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia (9.09)
106. Chapman University in Orange, California (9.17)
107. University of Missouri at Saint Louis (9.33)
108. Northeast Ohio MFA (Consortium) (10.00)
109. California State University in Fresno (10.00)
110. Minnesota State University in Mankato (10.00)
111. Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri (10.00)
112. McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana (10.00)
113. Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts (10.42)
114. University of Iowa in Iowa City (10.78)
115. New York University in New York City (12.50)
116. San Jose State University in California (12.50)
117. City College of New York, CUNY (13.33)
118. University of San Francisco in California (14.00)
119. Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota (17.14)
120. San Francisco State University in California (18.90)
121. Mills College in Oakland, California (23.75)
122. Columbia University in New York City (28.33)                 

Program Duration
A program's duration is measured by the average length of its curriculum in years. Some programs allow students to petition to extend their stay; because such petitions are granted on a case-by-case basis, and because the granting of such petitions often results in only an additional unfunded, non-tuition-remitted year of study, individual programs' program-extension policies have not been considered in calculating program duration. Nationally, only one full-residency MFA program is known to be one year in duration, and only two programs are four years in duration. The remaining 148 full-residency programs are either two or three years in duration, with programs ranked in the top fifty significantly more likely to be three years than are programs not ranked in the top fifty. Few programs that fund less than 33 percent of their incoming students are more than two years in duration. In fact, only six non-fully-funded top fifty programs are three years in duration, and all of these are either ranked in the top fifty for funding or else were awarded an Honorable Mention in the category. Fully funded programs are slightly more likely to be three years in duration as opposed to two; 59 percent of the thirty-four fully-funded programs in the top fifty are three years in duration or longer, and an additional three (9 percent) are known to offer substantial numbers of graduates third-year funding in some form or another. Low-residency programs are almost exclusively two years in duration, and yet these programs cannot be measured by their duration because, unlike full-residency programs, they are generally highly flexible with respect to the duration of their students' courses of study.

Assessments of program duration do not consider the availability of postgraduate fellowships, or automatic postgraduate placements, unless these opportunities are guaranteed to all rising third-years in good standing in the program. As applicable, nonguaranteed postgraduate funding opportunities are formally acknowledged in program funding calculations (see “The Full-Residency Rankings Chart: Additional Program Measures: Funding [15]") provided the average number of opportunities available each year is known. All this said, at least one program, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, so consistently offers a third-year lectureship to all or nearly all of its graduating students that it may nominally be considered a three-year program (some students even receive a fourth-year lectureship as well).

Program Size
In the rankings, the size of a program's annual incoming cohort is expressed using the usual acronyms for magnitude: XS (Extra-Small, an average total of two to nine students, per matriculating class, in the two major genres, fiction and poetry, combined); S (Small, ten to nineteen students); M (Medium, twenty to thirty-one students); L (Large, thirty-two to forty-nine students); and XL (Extra-Large, fifty or more students per year). Because many programs do not include their matriculating class size on their websites, in some instances this data has been extrapolated from other available information. One program, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was by necessity granted a special dispensation in several categories, as it is the only MFA program in the United States or abroad to admit fiction and poetry students in alternating years. This required two methodological accommodations: (1) using statistical extrapolation for the overall and genre rankings (the program’s previous-year percentage of all votes cast in the “off-year” genre—that is, the percentage of all fiction votes cast for the 2009–2010 application cycle that the University of Wisconsin’s fiction program received—is multiplied by the number of voters in that genre in the current year; this is then added to the actual number of votes the program received in the “on-year” genre); and (2) averaging the class-size figures for the program. Because the program accepts six poets and six fiction writers every two years, the program is treated as having an average annual matriculating class size of six.

Full Funding
Full funding is defined as the equivalent of a full tuition waiver and a minimum $8,000/academic year stipend. Where the tuition waiver offered is less than 100 percent, the program's stipend value is reduced by the amount an admitted student is asked to pay in tuition annually. All stipend values are adjusted for cost of living. Cost of living assessments were made using the website Sperling's Best Places (www.bestplaces.net/COL/default.aspx [16]). Healthcare costs, administrative fees, and student relocation costs were not estimated or considered, nor was the cost of tuition—as students receiving full funding, by the definition of the term used in the rankings, do not pay tuition.

In setting the stipend value for full funding at a cost-of-living-adjusted $8,000/academic year, the rankings make no assertion as to whether this should be considered a living wage. A single individual earning this amount per annum is eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit when filing federal taxes; however, because the "$8,000/academic year" standard translates to $8,000/nine months, this rate of income accrual in fact extrapolates to an annual income of $10,667. This is still below $13,440—the amount, in 2009 dollars, at which a single individual is phased out completely from the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The rankings acknowledge that MFA students receiving the minimum full-funding stipend may still find themselves borrowing a de minimis amount (defined as less than $3,000/academic year) to help defray the costs of program attendance. For the purposes of this article, the de minimis borrowing level has been set at that rate of borrowing that both puts an applicant out of range of pro-rated EITC coverage and yet results in less than $10,000 in total federal debt during a three-year MFA program. Of the nation's thrity-nine fully-funded full-residency programs, only two are known to offer cost-of-living-adjusted stipends of less than $10,000/academic year.

Cost of Living
The cost of living in the various programs' listed host locations was determined using Sperling's Best Places (www.bestplaces.net/COL/default.aspx [16]). All cost-of-living data were then compared to a randomly-selected national-average-range constant, in this case Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Notations used for cost of living are as follows: Very Low (16 percent or more below Ann Arbor, Michigan, the national-average-range constant for the 2012 rankings); Low (between 6 and 15 percent below); Average (between 5 percent below and 5 percent above); High (between 6 and 15 percent above); and Very High (16 percent or more above). While some students may choose to live outside the boundaries of their program's host location, commuting to an MFA program rather than living near campus includes hidden costs of its own, indeed costs of both a pecuniary and nonpecuniary nature. For this reason, only a program's host location was assessed for this measure. Cost-of-living adjustments were also used to determine the package value at individual programs for the Funding and Full Funding categories (see “Funding [15]” and “Full Funding”).

Teaching Load
While individual applicants' interest in teaching composition, rhetoric, literature, or creative writing to undergraduates will vary, generally speaking the most popular teaching load is a 1/1 (one course to be taught in the fall semester, one in the spring semester). The teaching loads of individual programs have not been ranked per se, yet this 1/1 standard has been used to determine whether a given program's teaching load is "light," "average," or "heavy." That is, because the 1/1 load is the most popular amongst applicants—though it is not the most common teaching load at MFA programs—average annual teaching loads of 0/0, 0/1, 1/0, and 1/1 have been denominated "light" by the rankings. An average annual teaching load of 2/1 or 1/2 (the most common teaching load) is termed "average," while an average annual teaching load of 2/2 is considered "heavy." Note that the term “load” is not used here pejoratively; some applicants will wish to teach more rather than less, even as other applicants prefer to do no teaching whatsoever. At present the rankings take no position whatsoever on the academic or professional value of teaching a large or small number of undergraduate sections per academic year.

The term "average" is used here in two different senses: First, to denote a category of teaching load; second, to indicate that all programs are assessed by their "average" teaching load. Because many programs offer different teaching-load packages to different students, and/or increase or decrease teaching load over the duration of the program, the average (mean) number of courses taught per year per student in each program is used. In some instances, students may request and/or get assigned—once admitted to a program—a larger and therefore better-compensated teaching load. Such additional teaching sections are by no means guaranteed, however, and therefore are not noted in or considered by the rankings chart.

Some programs fund a small enough percentage of admittees through teaching assistantships that to assign such programs an "average teaching load" would be to wrongly imply that admitted students are likely to receive an assistantship. For this reason, programs that offer assistantships to less than one-third of their incoming cohort received an asterisk in the "teaching load" column. Programs eligible for a "teaching load" designation, but which do not publicly disclose the teaching load they assign their teaching assistants, are indicated with a "Not Available" ("N/A") notation.

CGSR Compliance
The Council of Graduate Schools Resolution, also known as the “April 15th Resolution,” states that graduate programs that are signatories to the Resolution shall keep funded offers of admission open through April 15 of each application cycle. Colleges and universities that adhere to the Resolution represent that all of their constituent programs and departments adhere to the terms of the Resolution, which include mailing a copy of the Resolution with all acceptances. Under the terms of the Resolution programs may neither rescind nor threaten to rescind offers of admission to which any funding whatsoever is attached prior to April 15, nor may they explicitly or implicitly indicate to such accepted candidates, in writing or in person or via telephone, that there is any deadline for their matriculation decision other than April 15. Historically, MFA applicants have reported widespread noncompliance with the Resolution, which is problematic for applicants because CGSR-violative programs often require final matriculation decisions from applicants well before they have heard admissions responses from the other programs to which they applied. Applicants increasingly see such acceptances as excessively restrictive of their options and opportunities.

At present, only three CGSR signatories are believed to be noncompliant with the contract they and more than a hundred other universities signed and published for prospective applicants. This said, the CGSR Compliance category does not distinguish between programs known to have already violated the Resolution and those nonsignatories that simply could do so without running afoul of their host universities’ administrative policies. Therefore, while applicants should exercise due diligence and caution in applying to programs that are not CGSR compliant, they should also not presume violations will occur. The best policy is to contact nonsignatory programs directly and inquire regarding their CGSR-related policies; needless to say, some programs will welcome such queries more than others, as of late the question of the CGSR’s viability for creative writing MFA programs has been hotly contested by certain nonsignatory programs.

Any signatory to the CGSR found to be in violation of that contract will be listed as noncompliant, whether or not the program’s host college or university continues to be a CGSR signatory. Compliance inquiries are initiated on the basis of applicant self-reporting; since 2006, fully 100 percent of applicant complaints regarding programs’ CGSR-related policies have been found, following an investigation, to be meritorious. Indeed, in all but one instance the offending program ultimately confessed to the violation.