Education: The Average Age of an MFA Candidate is 27.3

Quit yer MFA angst!

By The Editors

The deadline for the MFA Creative Writing programs with the latest admissions deadlines is February 1st. OK, fine, you'll see a handful that accept applications as late as March 1st or 15th, but they're rare birds. We are firmly in freak-out season for MFA Creative Writing hopefuls. According to a 2017 LitHub article (more like a poem by the numbers), an average of 20,000 (!!!) MFA Creative Writing applications are submitted each season. Many of the writers who get accepted and end up enrolling are not straight out of college either. The average age of a full-time MFA student is 27.3 years old. But as LitHub Amy Brady demonstrates with her cheekily culled statistics, you don't need to have an MFA in Creative Writing to get your books published. Read "MFA By The Numbers, On the Eve of AWP" here (especially if you're thinking of going to AWP 2019 in Portland, Oregon, like our friends at CLASH Books.)