Vermont College of Fine Arts

What are the graduation rates for students at Vermont College of Fine Arts?

Traditional four- and six-year graduation-rate measures are a poor fit for evaluating VCFA's graduate MFA programs. Those commonly cited federal measures follow defined cohorts of first-time, full-time undergraduates, rather than tracking every graduate student through a low-residency degree.

Applicants comparing MFA programs should instead request program-level information: the expected number of semesters and residencies, the share of entrants who complete, and the typical time taken by completers. They should ask whether figures include students who pause enrollment or change their pace. A published undergraduate graduation rate from another college would not be a like-for-like comparison with VCFA's graduate population.

What is the earning potential for graduates at Vermont College of Fine Arts?

An MFA from VCFA should not be evaluated against a presumed school-wide starting salary. Creative careers can combine salaried jobs, teaching, contract work, commissions, publishing income, and self-employment, so one annual earnings figure can obscure substantial differences among graduates.

Any earnings estimate a student encounters needs a definition: whether it reports a median or mean, how long after completion it was measured, and which former students were counted. Federal earnings measures, for example, do not necessarily represent every graduate or every source of income. Applicants can pair carefully defined earnings evidence with questions about alumni career paths and their own likely borrowing; neither a degree nor an earnings statistic promises an individual result.