Assessing the M.F.A. in photography.

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."

All of these M.F.A. photography programs attract more applicants than there are places for students. According to RIT coordinator Angela Kelly, the number of applications has hovered around 50 per year until this past fall, when 75 were received for 15-20 places. Although she attributed the recent increase in applications to the quality of the program, not the U.S. News rankings, Kelly said that the top ranking had definitely helped to improve relations with RIT's administration, which two years ago had threatened to close the program. At UNM, outgoing chair Betty Hahn said that although the rankings "may stimulate applications, we only have four or five places." In fact, applications are down from a high of 100 in 1990, to 70 or 80 the past two years. The chair of SAIC's photography program, Barbara DeGenevieve, said that the program consistently receives around 100 applications each year for 12-15 slots. Ann Fessler, chair of RISD's photography program, reported that the program received 107 applicants for 4-8 places this year. She suggested that the visiting-artist program stimulates more interest in RISD's photography program than the U.S. News rankings. Birrell at CalArts said "the rankings are absolutely ridiculous, and have absolutely no impact on graduate enrollment." Like the other top-ranked programs, CalArts experienced a high applicant/admissions ratio -- some 80 applications for 20 spots in next year's class.

As the comments suggest, the administrators of the top-ranked programs are not particularly interested in or concerned about the U.S. News rankings. However, the large number of applications does raise an important question: At a time when the career prospects of graduates are especially dismal and desultory -- according to CAA data, last year there were only 46 teaching vacancies in "film, video, or photography -- why are hundreds of young people applying to M.F.A. programs in photography?

One explanation offered by Deborah Bright, coordinator of RISD's program, is that "graduate students have been out in the real world, and they want independent work." Affirming her colleague's observation, Fessler said that RISD graduate students "want to be part of a community of artists; they want to be able to work yet have a break from a regular job." Though not specifically about the photography M.F.A., dean Carol Becker offers this cogent explanation in SAIC's current graduate catalog: "the possibility of devoting a concentrated period of time to art making and critical thinking is one of the most exciting prospects imaginable."

While is prospect is undeniably attractive, so too is the prospect of successful professional careers. "The attitude of students has changed," said SAIC's DeGenevieve, "they want programs that give them valuable job skills; they want to have something to fall back on." At RISD, Fessler has observed significant changes in student expectations: "Up until three or four years ago most graduate students thought they could get a teaching job. Now students have fewer illusions about getting such a job; they're coming in with their eyes open. This year only two of the six students requested a teaching assistantship."

These statements are filled with cruel ironies. If students want to gain valuable job skills -- like webpage design or school teaching -- why not skip the photo M.F.A. and apply directly to graphic design programs or teacher education institutes? If there are so few college teaching jobs for M.F.A. graduates, why do programs continue to offer "teaching assistantships" to their students? If students are entering graduate programs with their eyes wide open, what careers do they see for themselves?

It would appear that the rankings of photography departments in American's Best Graduate Schools have no relationship to the photography profession Like America's Best Colleges, its famous predecessor, America's Best Graduate Schools is written for an educational consumer with limited time and money. Its producers assume that a graduate education in photography, like other kinds of graduate education, is a valuable and expensive consumer good. Moreover, they assume that photography programs differ in quality, and that the higher the quality the more valuable the education on the labor market. If all of these assumptions are correct, rankings ought to help consumers to identify the most valuable programs.

But graduate photography education does not seem to be a valuable consumer good like other kinds of graduate educations. Because the traditional occupational tracks have withered away, the main benefits of graduate photography education appear to be cognitive, such as "art making," "critical thinking" and "personal development." If graduate photography education has become an expensive consumer good with significant cognitive rewards -- a good like psychotherapy or trekking in Nepal -- then we need to change the way we rank, evaluate and otherwise assess the M.F.A. in photography.