Fine Arts faculty, Caroline Woolard was recently interviewed in Art21 for the project BFAMFAPhD. Woolard was inspired to start BFAMFAPhD after Cooper Union’s board decided last April to start charging tuition, which was previously a tuition free intuition for undergraduates for the last 154 years. According to the BFAMFAPhD website, BFAMFAPhD “visualizes the number of students graduating with creative degrees, generates dialog about our collective power, and elicits proposals for organizing efforts. We already do these things together: we learn about art, go into debt, circulate ideas, support the economy, and (re)produce relationships and identities.”

From Art21:”Since 2008, Woolard has been researching how artists are professionalized in this country. According to that year’s census, there are over more than three million artists in America. There are more artists than police officers, lawyers, or doctors in this country. Every decade, one third of that lot receives a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree in the arts. From 1987 to 2012, there were 1,827,087 graduates with a BFA, MFA, or PhD in the visual and performing arts.1 Despite the recent criticism of MFA programs, these numbers are growing.”

Read the article: BFAMFAPhD: An Imaginative School of Thought