Creative writing degrees grew sixfold from the late 1980s to 2013

Evidence

As poet-critics Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young show in their study of the whiteness (or not) of MFA programs, the growth of creative writing degrees (BA, BFA, MA, and MFA) has been exponential in the period that concerns us: at the end of the 1980s, around 1,000 degrees were awarded per year; by 2013, the annual figure was 6,500.42 The rising demand for degrees meant a growth in programs (for instance, 300 schools have added creative writing graduate programs since 1975), yet this growth also coincided with ruinous declines in the percentage of instruction performed by tenured faculty, and with enormous tuition increases. Central to this growth is the boom of “creative non-fiction” as a capacious binder for expressive documentary across memoir and journalism, which is also reflected at the graduate level in new specialized academic programs like the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing or King’s College Network for Life-Writing Research. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 140

Categorization

• CANDY: The 1,000 to 6,500 degrees per year jump in a generation is a striking, quotable stat.