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

Since 1983 U of recent origins & World Report has published an annual special issue and standalone publication called America's Best bodys that gives a numerical ranking to 1422 accredited four-year academys This increasingly popular and profitable series -- above one million copies of the volume version were sold last year -- has readyed magazines such as Sports Illustrated, circulating medium Magazine and Yahoo! Internet Life to publish society and university rankings for their constituencies. The succes of America's Best guilds also paved the way for America's Best Graduate academys which U. S. News issued in March 1995 and March 1997

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

As far as I've been able to determine, these rankings photography at any time to be published -- a significant occurrence in the history of photography. According to the 1995 edition of America's Best Graduate institutes 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 of recent origin Mexico (UNM), 3. School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), 4 Rhode Island gymnasium of Design (RISD) and 5 Yale University. The 1997 edition of America's Best Graduate seminarys showed changes in the next to the first third and fifth rankings: 1 RIT, 2 SAIC, 3 UNM 4 RISD and 5 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

by what means exactly, does U. S. freshs & World Report define and measure "quality" in graduate photography education? by the agency of reputational survey. According to the fine print in the 1997 edition of America's Best Graduate seminarys in the fall of 1996 questionnaires were sent to "deans, top administrators, and senior faculty" at all 190 art gymnasiums and departments that offer the M.F.A. Respondent (40% of those surveyed) were asked to rank "the reputations" of seminarys and their specialty areas upon 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 freshs and World Report was "told by the agency of some art school deans that art education is a different kind of animal and that reputational rankings are the alone way to go," said research director Robert Morse.

Art academy officials have good reason to tender the reputational survey to other measures because useful, comparative information about graduate art education either is not bring togethered or is difficult to obtain -- or one as well as the other 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 single chapter from Barbara Rosenblum's Photographers at Work (1978) and a scattering of articles upon selected issues by A. D Coleman, Jan Zita Grover Martha Rosler myself and a not many 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) -- admitting these essays offer remarkably little information about the author's photography programs.

The scholarly literature notwithstanding, there are basically solitary three other sources of information about M.F.A. programs in photography. The first source is "numbers books" similar as Graduate Education in Photography in the United States, published by the agency of the Society for Photographic Education in 1985; and MFA Programs in the Visual Arts: A Directory, published by means of the College Art Association of America (CAA) in 1987 and updated in 1995 A next to the first source is the promotional material that art academys and universities distribute to prospective learners The third source of information about M.F.A. programs in photography is the knowledge that administrators, faculty, scholars 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 gymnasiums 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 appear to bes that of all the fine art departments, photography programs are the greatest in quantity committed to interdisciplinarity, postmodernism, experimentation, or what have you. Although learners enter as photographers (they must submit a portfolio of photographic work to be considered for admission), they ne not remain "in" photography, as it were, to graduate. In fact, one time matriculated and introduced to contemporary art and theory, photography learners can work with any material in any media in any form as lengthy as one can defend its service to an intriguing idea or an important cause. For greatest in quantity photography students, large studio spaces are as important as darkrooms -- if not more important. CalArts chair Ellen Birrell sum totals up the situation: "It's an uneven historical moment to be a photo program."