LOS ANGELES — The Master of Fine Arts, said MFA, has long been considered an advantageous if not indispensable step on the path to becoming a full-fledged artist. For the past few decades, Los Angeles has been recognized as a hotbed of arts education, with a handful of art schools churning out waves of newly minted MFAs each spring. But while the cost of living and attending art school in the city has skyrocketed alongside the growth of these programs, are art students still flocking there in the same numbers as before?
Based on LA area art school numbers shared with Hyperallergic, the answer, for the most part, is more nuanced than one might expect: yes, MFA enrollment is still high, but some schools have seen a modest but not insignificant decline. The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the region’s largest graduate-level art school, had 1,372 applicants in 2014, including 242 that year. By 2023, those numbers have dropped slightly to 1,191 applicants, including 196 participants, a 19% drop in enrollment. Otis College of Art & Design had 32 MFA Fine Arts students enrolled in 2018 and 25 in 2022. Figures for other schools including University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design (USC), University of California , Los Angeles (UCLA), and University of California, Irvine (UCI) were more consistent, although it should be noted that they have far fewer students than CalArts, some with as few as seven or eight per cohort, like USC.
Notably, applications to USC’s MFA program fell from a peak of 398 in 2014 to 90 in 2016, though this is likely related to the near collapse of the program in 2015. In 2023, the program received 106 applications. UC Irvine received 173 MFA requests in 2019, which fell to 149 in 2020 and 126 in 2021. Presumably, the COVID-19 pandemic is also partly responsible for these declines.
Speaking more broadly about MFA programs nationwide, Deborah Obalil, president and executive director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD), says Hyperallergic that there was a peak in MFA enrollment in 2011, with a slight decline since then – consistent with higher education as a whole, which saw a 15% decline.
“It’s no surprise that graduate arts enrollments have mirrored this general trend,” she says. She suggests that the falling birth rate and the rising cost of higher education are partly to blame, adding that “on the whole, people naturally make different choices.”
In light of recent Supreme Court decisions invalidating affirmative action in college admissions and President Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Programit is conceivable that the intersection of race and class will become even more tense as the challenges increase for economically disadvantaged art students and applicants of color.
“I think this will likely lead to more international POC students paying the full ride and fewer subsidized or domestic POC students, which means students overall will be further removed from the political realities of race in the states. United,” Anuradha Vikram, a part-time curator, writer, and lecturer who has taught at UCLA, USC, CalArts, and Otis recounted Hyperallergic.
Amelia Jones, a writer and professor at USC Roski School of Art & Design who is currently writing a book on the neoliberal college phenomenon, doesn’t think the decision would directly impact MFA applicants, but could still affect MFA programs.
“Graduate programs in general and certainly not MFA programs in particular do not use affirmative action guidelines such as those rejected by the Supreme Court… There is however a risk that universities will overreact to decision and proactively apply the anti-diversity idea to broad areas. of the university, which would very unfortunately affect senior staff hires as well as faculty hires and graduate programs,” Jones said. Hyperallergic.
“The decision to reverse Biden’s attempt to write off student debt will have a much more immediate effect on MFA students, no doubt,” Jones added. “The absurdity of running educational institutions by putting people into debt is now clear and this whole system should be wiped out and reorganized so that it does not happen again in the future.”
Despite the declines that some schools have experienced, many art students still clearly see the benefits of an MFA. “A lot of the time what they do is twofold – they provide space and time for artists to develop a self-directed practice, and they connect artists to industry networks that will support them,” Vikram said. .
However, the rising cost of MFA programs, combined with a parallel rise in the cost of living in LA – raises serious questions, not just for students but for the schools themselves. MFA tuition fees vary, from around $21,000 per year for California residents at UCLA to between $50,000 and $58,000 at ArtCenter, CalArts, and Otis and around $66,000 per year at USC.
“I am concerned that the increase in tuition fees will lead to a situation where many MFA programs accept students who are not sufficiently experienced in the field, who do not have artistic practices that they have developed consistently. nor aware of what the expectation of the field is and is not ready to absorb new practical and relevant information because he is very worried about the high cost of tuition he is incurring,” added Vikram.
Jones added that the problem of rising tuition fees for MFA degrees is part of a larger development of a capitalist growth model applied to college.
“You have growing universities, but without thoughtful development of funding models,” she said. Hyperallergic. “In this case, the state requires that universities have measurable “outcomes” (students) and that students do the same (“jobs”). It distorts everything an arts or arts education was once supposed to be.
It should be noted that dedicated design programs have become more prominent in some of these schools, especially given the difficulty of applying traditional models of “achievement” or “responsibility” to the fine arts. A total of 11 students were enrolled at Otis’s MFA in Graphic Design program in 2018, which grew to 19 in 2022. USC had 10 students enrolled in its Design MFA in 2018, the year it launched, with 18 enrolled last year. Notably, applications for the program have grown from 26 in 2018 to 132 this year, possibly signaling a shift in interest toward art-focused programs with perceived real-world applications.
To rank higher in the rankings, schools must appear more selective, attracting and then rejecting more applicants.
“Universities had to start competing for candidates – raising money from millionaires to build fancy buildings they could name after the donor, generating huge marketing and branding campaigns to recruit as many candidates as possible so that they can reject a higher percentage – which hugely increases the cost of running a university,” Jones explained. “So tuition is going up.”
Last year, a group of ArtCenter faculty started the Free Grad Art initiative, with the ultimate goal of covering tuition for all students in the MFA program. (MFA Tuition was nearly $26,000 per semester this year.) They started with a profit from the sale of works of art by faculty and alumni through the David Zwirner Gallery last July, in hopes of fully covering an MFA student’s tuition.
Alternative models have also emerged, such as the Crenshaw Dairy Mart Stock Exchange, through which three artists participate in a program of conferences, workshops and reviews. Fellows also receive a $100,000 grant, provided by an anonymous foundation for the first year of the program.
To that end, Jones notes that the MFA model is relatively new and that alternatives have existed in the past and will likely emerge in the future. “Human creativity, hope and joy are impossible to eradicate – very fortunately… As many other cultures have shown us, there are other ways to create, share and build human connections. This model is not the only one.
