By Nina McCambridge
In November, the School of Art made its MFA program free for all current and future students. This change was announced last November. Though this policy had not yet been officially implemented, it was already the case that all MFA students had their tuition fully covered by financial aid.
In an interview with The Tartan, School of Art head Charlie White said that when he stepped into the role in 2016, improving funding was one of his main goals. “We’ve actually just been moving towards this goal steadily and the difference between where we currently have been maybe for the last year, year and a half, and where we are now in our statement is that we now know that we can do this in perpetuity.” White said that even before he arrived at the School of Art, the MFA program “already had a kind of ambition to be as accessible and affordable as possible.”
Before this strong guarantee was announced, the MFA program had already had a policy of giving every student at least a two-thirds scholarship. Besides aid, students can get research grants and are allowed to work. Some tuition-free programs, such as that of Stanford University, have teaching requirements for MFA students, but the Carnegie Mellon program does not.
Even without tuition, being an MFA student is not cheap. According to Professor White, “If you take tuition away, what you’re doing is you’re just leaving the cost of moving, living, sustaining your own wellbeing while you’re in school, right? All of those things are still part of what it means to be in graduate school. So I see the tuition really as the most important thing that we can do as a program, but I’m not overlooking the fact that it doesn’t solve every problem for the student.”
Becoming an MFA student does not guarantee financial stability in the long term. White said that “within Culture and the Arts, there are trajectories of study that do not have outcomes where industry employment and security is waiting for [graduates] in the same way.” White said that this is one of the reasons why the School of Art has a small MFA program.
The program is funded by “a variety of things,” White said, including “very important gifts from donors, very important endowed opportunities to support students, and also the school’s ability to carefully balance its resources in a way that would help to make that work. … We didn’t have the need for their tuition in this particular program because it is small and it has a history of years of focus on trying to reach this goal.”
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