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After mass defection, USC's MFA program has a single student

Earlier this year, we published an open letter from first-year MFA students at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design announcing that they were dropping out in protest of tuition hikes and broken promises regarding financial support from the school. Well, the fall semester has started at Roski’s MFA program, and now there is only a single solitary student left. Artforum has the report:

The fall semester began for USC’s MFA program on Monday—but the program, this year, only has one art student: a woman from South Korea on a fully funded scholarship and educational visa, reports LA Weekly’s Isaac Simpson.

Earlier this spring, all the first-year students at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program dropped out of the degree course en masse, citing changes to the program during their first year and lack of funding and teaching experience that was promised by the school, as Artforum previously reported here. The students also released a letter detailing their struggle with the university administration and their reasons for collectively making the decision to leave the course.

Later, seventy-three alumni of the University of Southern California’s MFA program in art signed an open letter of support for the dropouts. And ten faculty members criticized the program, and dean Erica Muhl, for “shifting resources and focus away from the execution of our core educational mission and towards bloated administrative salaries, lavish infrastructure projects, and a business model of education.”