Assessing the M.F.A. in photography - evaluation of the Master of Fine Arts programs as ranked in US News and World Report's America's Best Graduate Schools

Afterimage, July-August, 1997 by Michael Starenko

Since 1983, U.S. News & World Report has published an annual special issue and standalone publication called America's Best Colleges that gives a numerical ranking to 1422 accredited four-year schools. This increasingly popular and profitable series -- over one million copies of the book version were sold last year -- has prompted magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Money Magazine and Yahoo! Internet Life to publish college and university rankings for their constituencies. The success of America's Best Colleges also paved the way for America's Best Graduate Schools, which U. S. News issued in March 1995 and March 1997.

Among the institutions ranked in America's Best Graduate Schools are Master of Fine Arts programs in the visual arts that offer specialties or concentrations in photography. These "M.F.A. photography programs," as they're commonly called, can best be understood as a degree program within a photography program within an art program. Of the roughly 375 photography programs in the country, approximately 120 offer the M.F.A. degree.

As far as I've been able to determine, these rankings photography ever to be published -- a significant event in the history of photography. According to the 1995 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools, the art schools, colleges and departments with the best M.F.A. programs in photography, in rank order, are: 1. Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), 2. University of New Mexico (UNM), 3. School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), 4. Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and 5. Yale University. The 1997 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools showed changes in the second, third and fifth rankings: 1. RIT, 2 SAIC, 3. UNM, 4. RISD and 5. California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

How, exactly, does U. S. News & World Report define and measure "quality" in graduate photography education? By reputational survey. According to the fine print in the 1997 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools, in the fall of 1996 questionnaires were sent to "deans, top administrators, and senior faculty" at all 190 art schools and departments that offer the M.F.A. Respondents (40% of those surveyed) were asked to rank "the reputations" of schools and their specialty areas on a scale from "1" to "5", "taking into account a school's scholarship, its curriculum, and the quality of its faculty and graduate students." Other measures -- the "placement success" of graduates, for example -- were not used because U.S. News and World Report was "told by some art school deans that art education is a different kind of animal and that reputational rankings are the only way to go," said research director Robert Morse.

Art school officials have good reason to prefer the reputational survey to other measures because useful, comparative information about graduate art education either is not collected or is difficult to obtain -- or both. For example, we have no history of the M.F.A. in photography, nor any sustained sociological, ethnographic or journalistic studies of it. The scholarly literature, at best, consists of one chapter from Barbara Rosenblum's Photographers at Work (1978), and a scattering of articles on selected issues by A. D. Coleman, Jan Zita Grover, Martha Rosler, myself and a few other writers. We might also include the published reflections of retired or retiring M.F.A. faculty -- the kind of writing published, for example, in Thomas Hess and Tony Frederick's anthology Teaching Photography (1981) -- though these essays offer remarkably little information about the author's photography programs.

The scholarly literature notwithstanding, there are basically only three other sources of information about M.F.A. programs in photography. The first source is "numbers books," such as Graduate Education in Photography in the United States, published by the Society for Photographic Education in 1985; and MFA Programs in the Visual Arts: A Directory, published by the College Art Association of America (CAA) in 1987 and updated in 1995. A second source is the promotional material that art schools and universities distribute to prospective students. The third source of information about M.F.A. programs in photography is the knowledge that administrators, faculty, students and alumni carry around in their heads.

To tap this third source, I called the chairpersons and coordinators of the photography programs that had been ranked in the top five of this year's edition of America's Best Graduate Schools and asked them how they interpreted the photography M.F.A. at a time when higher education is in a fiscal crisis and interdisciplinarity is the dominant paradigm.

From the discussions it seems that of all the fine art departments, photography programs are the most committed to interdisciplinarity, postmodernism, experimentation, or what have you. Although students enter as photographers (they must submit a portfolio of photographic work to be considered for admission), they need not remain "in" photography, as it were, to graduate. In fact, once matriculated and introduced to contemporary art and theory, photography students can work with any material in any media in any form as long as one can defend its service to an intriguing idea or an important cause. For most photography students, large studio spaces are as important as darkrooms -- if not more important. CalArts chair Ellen Birrell sums up the situation: "It's an odd historical moment to be a photo program."