best colleges for creative writing

best colleges for creative writing

Best Colleges for Creative Writing

1. Introduction

Creative writing is a highly individualized field of study, meaning the exact curriculum and experience you’re looking for will undoubtedly influence which program is best for you. What the above list will help you find is a university known for its excellent English department and a school with a proven record of success in providing a useful and lucrative degree in English or Creative Writing. Do you want to be the next Pulitzer Prize winner? Or maybe you’re just looking for a school that will help you better your writing. Perhaps you’re looking for a creative writing program that is less intensive and a bit more flexible. This is the ideal starting point. Since each student is not just looking for a good college, but the perfect college, this list may facilitate the search for the US school that is right for you. It’s a good start. All of these schools offer the best programs that will help you gain the skills you need to succeed as a writer, but which one is the best fit for you? This is the next question that the above list may help answer.

2. Factors to Consider

In consideration of education of comparable quality, location may be the tipping point for the decision of college with all other factors relatively equal. Some students have the luxury of family financial support and choose to study away from home, and then there are others who need to work while studying to support themselves. Housing and living expenses are often outrageous in the vicinity of private institutions, so it is important to take into account whether the cost of living may over-inflate the cost of education if it is not fully funded. College reputation and corresponding network for future careers often have regional bias; one must investigate how schools in desired future work locations view a certain out-of-state or foreign degree. As with the situation of a transfer student, degree acceptance in whole or in part between institutions may become an issue. All of these factors should be considered for the student who may see themselves completing their degree at another institution, as the money and time spent at the first college should have academically benefited their future at the second location.

Frequency of any kind of institutional funding, including scholarships, is among the most important factors to consider in essential financial aid decisions. Highest funding impacts a student’s ability to continue studying any major throughout their undergraduate years, encouraging degree completion. If a student views life after college without much of an option due to little to no money to pay off large student loans, this is a breeding ground for potential incomplete degree or discouragement in furthering education in graduate school. It may be helpful to consider educational ROI (Return on Investment) for this factor, which is greatly simplified as (Potential Career Earnings with Degree) – (Total Cost of Education), although it is hard to measure actual future earnings in specific academic fields. A good tool to compare ROI within colleges is through their alumni career surveys, which may gather data of the earnings of bachelor’s degree earners within the first 10 years after graduation. This factor should be analyzed in conjunction with the cost of education, as it is an estimation of how much the education will actually cost with included debt and time of payment.

3. Top Colleges for Creative Writing

Columbia University in the City of New York offers 6 Creative Writing Degree programs. It’s a large private university in a large city. In 2015, 342 students graduated in the study area of Creative Writing with students earning 248 Master’s degrees and 94 Bachelor’s degrees. Columbia University in the City of New York offers the only MFA in Creative Writing in the Ivy League. The program is also the only one of its kind to form a collaboration between Columbia’s School of the Arts and School of General Studies. This means that students from any major can take the creative writing courses, and they are not required to take extensive literature courses as a prerequisite to enrolling in a creative writing course. This is helpful if your main goal is to test if writing is right for you. In fact, many students come to the program with an interest in teaching creative writing and leave with a high success rate of going on to publish.

NYU offers an English major and a Creative Writing minor. Upon arrival at the university, all English majors and minors in creative writing will be advised in the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House. NYU has been a prominent university for studying creative writing under the tutelage of a successful author. In 2007, The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House was endowed. Now located in Greenwich Village, this house provides workshop courses, readings, and an extensive faculty and student directory. The house is a meeting place for students and faculty of different programs at NYU and has developed a community of serious writers who wish to gain and impart an understanding of the art of writing. The Creative Writing Program now occupies a lovely townhouse on West 10th Street in the same Greenwich Village neighborhood where so many writers have lived and worked. Each year, the Creative Writing Program gives many readings and workshops; the reading series features the works of many well-known authors and poets.

4. Benefits of Pursuing Creative Writing in College

Studying creative writing at the college level offers a unique opportunity for students who are more inclined toward the art of writing than the mechanics of it. Creative writing is an ever-expanding field of study, with more and more schools offering it as a separate major from your standard English track. Unfortunately, as more creative writing programs crop up, it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and figure out which programs are the best! And that’s where you come in. What a wonderful thing it would be to go to the very best schools for you and your particular talents! By sticking to this short list, you’ll be sure to find the school that is the best fit for your writing interests, and what you want to get out of the experience. Another undeniably appealing aspect of creative writing programs is the low student to teacher ratio. It is a widely held belief in academic circles that the smaller the class size, the better the education. Creative writing programs are certainly a good place to try and test this theory. When you consider what the nature of the field is, it makes perfect sense. Writing is a very individual, personal art, and each person has his or her own particular method for putting words to paper. In a workshop setting, where the main focus is the work itself, this individuality is given room to grow and develop. The writer is able to take the teacher’s and classmates’ criticisms and suggestions in a way that he may not be to their Algebra homework, and immediately put it to use in a second draft. This kind of attention and immediate feedback on their work is invaluable to a writer. In programs where frantically overworked teachers are forced to try and grade a hundred papers in one night, you just can’t get that same kind of attention.

5. Conclusion

Winslow concluded that the aim in the teaching of creative writing is “to help students focus and engage their own creative process through practice and determination” and not to mimic “the results of someone else’s creative process.” The best teaching of creative writing needs not only to develop the artistic side of a student, but it will need to develop their critical faculties, and for this reason creative writing in the academy has not been without its critics. The infusion of the creative writing workshop with literary study has led to a well-publicized split in the academy between that which is written and that which is read with some critics questioning the very legitimacy of a discipline that produces its own kind of writing. The practice and the study of the discipline have repeatedly led to the marginalization of creative writing and literary magazines and the relegation of the status of creative practitioners and their work. The best creative writing also has its share of howlers. Assuming that the writer has no need to engage with theory and should be using only their experience and intuition to create. This anti-intellectualism is decried by the belief that knowledge of theory and craft can enrich the creative process and the anti-academic prejudice that creative writers have encountered in workshops teaching A2 level and undergraduate courses.