P / Workshop · Premium · 13 November 2026

The Workshop · Tool

MFA or New York? Put in your own numbers.

Most of the argument is unstated assumptions about hours, rent and what an agent is worth. Here every assumption is a slider, and the verdict moves as you do.

  • Fiction & poetry
  • Career
  • About 5 minutes
  • Free tool
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the MFANew Yorkstipendrentday-job hourswriting time MFA or New York? Change the assumptions and watch the verdict move Poetic.ly

Free to use

  • The calculator: funded, unfunded and low-residency MFAs against a New York day job
  • Flip points: the exact value where your verdict changes
  • After the two years: words drafted, books finished, cash, and any debt

For members · Fellowship and above

  • The record: all 26 Pulitzer fiction winners since 2000 and the degree each holds (13 have a graduate creative-writing degree)
  • What writers who chose said, from Contemporary Literature interviews on JSTOR: Gyasi, Kushner, McGurl, Nguyen, Davis
  • A reading list for the argument, from The Program Era to "MFA vs. POC"

Chad Harbach split American fiction into two cultures in 2010: the MFA and New York. This page doesn't settle the argument. Your numbers do. Set the sliders to your actual life, and the verdict updates as you go, along with the exact point where it would flip.

Change my assumptions · No. 1

The question

Two years in a funded program with a stipend, a teaching load and a cohort, or two years in New York with a day job, a rent check and a city full of editors. Most arguments about this are really arguments about assumptions nobody states out loud: how many hours a job eats, what a room costs, what proximity to agents is worth to you.

Below, every assumption is a slider. Defaults marked sourced come from published data; the rest are placeholders, so put in your own offer, salary and rent.

Your assumptions

The MFA

New York

You, either way

What matters to you

How much each outcome should count in the verdict.

The verdict

What would change your mind

The verdict holds until one of these lines is crossed. Each is the value where the result flips, with everything else left as you set it.

    After the two years

    What each path leaves you holding when the comparison ends.

    Members · The record

    What the winners did

    Where the numbers come from

    • New York rent share, $2,215/month (default): half the citywide median asking rent for a two-bedroom, $4,430 in February 2026. StreetEasy.
    • For comparison, median asking rent in September 2026 was $4,995 in Manhattan, $3,945 in Brooklyn and $3,400 in Queens. StreetEasy.
    • The book itself won't pay either rent: full-time literary fiction authors reported a median book income of $5,000 for 2022. Authors Guild 2023 survey.
    • Iowa gives every Workshop student equal funding: full tuition plus a living stipend. The amount isn't on its funding page, so the stipend here is a placeholder. Iowa Writers' Workshop.
    • Salary, living costs, hours and the two "worth to you" sliders are placeholders by design.
    • The framing: Chad Harbach, "MFA vs NYC," n+1, 2010.

    How the verdict is scored: each outcome (writing hours, money, network) is split between the two paths by share, weighted by your priorities, and summed. Writing hours = (168 − life hours − work hours) × the share of free time you actually write × 50 weeks a year. Finished books = writing hours × words per hour ÷ (manuscript length × drafts per book).

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