The Master of Fakeness: How Higher Education Exploits Students to Bring in Cash Flow

One of the best things I wrote was my master’s thesis on D.H. Lawrence in 2000. While writing and revising it, I almost gave up. That was the point, though. The whole point of mastering something is to prove that you are good at it. And this is where the MFA or MA in creative writing is a total fake. Our accreditation agencies have allowed such, but that is a whole other story.

It may help to review what the point of writing a graduate-level thesis paper is all about. In general, it will be a work that is about 80 or more pages in length, using one hundred sources or more. Those one hundred sources need to be vetted. That means sources have to be factual, unbiased, and cleared by experts in the field. Some of them can be primary sources. These are the sources that the writer is writing about. So, in my example, I was writing about D. H. Lawrence’s novels, more particularly, how the narrator had the reader gaze at the characters through the narrator’s use of language.

I was fortunate that, though I went to a small college, my thesis director was the president of the D. H. Lawrence Society. Such may mean nothing to most of you, but for nerds who study literature, that is a very big deal. He even interviewed Rita Dove, and I had a chance to work on that project. Dr. Earl Ingersoll, my director, was tough, very tough. But I graduated feeling that I wrote something academically sound.

Such served me well. I went on to get a PhD in literature and criticism and taught full-time for twenty years. Few job markets are as brutal as the one in English, yet I always had work. While I never roamed the halls of the Ivy League or the First Tier, I did do well for myself and my family. That master’s got me there. However, colleges’ and universities’ exploitation of students burned me out and forced me to leave.

The problem with the Master’s in Creative Writing is that almost all master’s theses published by schools are incomplete works. Most creative writing theses will be only 80 pages long, yet almost all creative writers are there to write novels, not shorter novellas. Students write either creative fiction or non-fiction novels. Yes, it is acceptable for a poet to write 80 pages of poetry and master their craft, but when is the last time you read a 78-page novel?

Usually, 80 pages is about three chapters of a book. Colleges and Universities are giving students a vetted master’s degree, an incomplete work, that somehow demonstrates their mastery of the craft. Is it such an administrative joke? Even the Harvard Extension School offers an MA in writing (creative writing) where you can get a highly sought-after master’s degree.  The committee, all adjunct faculty, read only two chapters of the thesis. The student completes three chapters, but the faculty doesn’t read the third chapter. You are welcome to write more, that is true in MFA programs, too. It’s just that no one will look at it. The graduate student does not have to revise it.  How is such possible? That is like a student taking the SAT but only the first five percent of the test counts.

To show that one can write a good novel, one would have to produce and revise a work extensively over 300 pages or more. This is at the doctoral level. Go to your bookshelf and pull out that YA novel your teen has been reading. Look at how many pages it is. Anne Frank’s definitive Diary of a Young Girl spans almost 400 pages. Remember that Ms. Frank was between 13-14 years old when she penned her diary. Louise Gornall’s Under Rose-Tainted Skies is over 326 pages.

The easiest solution is to update the Master of Arts in Creative Writing to a Doctorate of Arts in Creative Writing. In that case, the committee will read the whole novel, as will your director and two other faculty members several times. It would also mean that most schools would have to shutter their MFA programs altogether.

As it stands now, English programs are producing creative writing professors who have not completed the very work they were producing while in the program, only a fraction of it. There are many writers with such degrees that go on to publish, but there are many more without MFAs that publish. Just ask Stephen King what he thinks about MFA programs.

The idea of dumbing down the master’s degree is likely a business-minded decision over an educational or academic one: make it easy for someone to get a degree. The obsession is with retention and graduation, not quality of education. If so-called extreme liberals took over higher education, then far-right conservatives took over the administration. As it stands today, many degrees are not worth the paper they are written on. This is why student loan debt has to be addressed. Students are being fleeced.

When looking at Harvard’s program, not one of their faculty in the writing Extension program is Harvard faculty. They are all adjuncts where Harvard has created this caste system of their “real faculty professors” and the part-time ones. The University can pass these teachers off to the “consumer” as actual Harvard faculty simply because they have Harvard email addresses.

When I asked, the program could not even provide me with a curriculum or access to these faculty members. Something similar is true for Harvard’s first-year writing faculty. They are all full-time temps that the department kicks out after a few years. It turns out that Harvard is willing to sell its name and fake it after all. I don’t say this lightly. I was once a volunteer Evaluator for the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. In my experience, such programs are there to simply exploit students. Harvard risks losing its accreditation, that is if the Middle States would do what it’s supposed to do. What Harvard is doing is egregious.

But every MFA in creative writing does the same thing. They graduate writers who have only completed part of their work because that is all that is required of them. They may have written a lot in the program, but what matters is the final “exam.” The thesis is the work that proves they have mastered the profession when it comes to creative writing.

I know because I went and tried a few programs. I was shocked and appalled. Students are spending tens of thousands of dollars to get a piece of paper that says they are a master at something, which is incomplete.

There are master’s degrees without a thesis requirement. There are doctorates like this, too. But many of these are in question. You can get a Doctorate in Social Work without even having to write a thesis at a master’s level. They replaced theses and dissertations with one-semester projects. I have questioned the validity of such doctoral programs that see students as cash cows.

The PhD in social work is valid and rigorous because it adds critical research and writing components that master’s students don’t have. The Master of Social Work has internships instead of a thesis. That makes sense for professions like nursing, social work, and occupational therapy. We don’t need to write thesis papers. We need to treat clients for illnesses. These are clinical degrees.

But writing is all about reading, writing, and especially revising. Anyone who loves to write knows that it’s all about revising. Yet, these MFA and MA programs allow writers to complete less than half of a creative work but such qualifies them to teach at a college or university.

This is another example of how colleges and universities throughout the United States have exploited and continue to exploit students so that they can stay up and running. The school’s existence is what matters not the graduates it produces.

The MA and MFA in creative writing are just a few examples. One can now get a master’s or doctorate in just about anything. Such would not be a problem if the degrees were valid and rigorous. I fear that most of these degrees are nothing more than continuing education credits dressed up, packaged, and marketed as graduate-level degrees. This is the very reason I left higher education in the first place.