The MFA, uh, pyramid scheme?

Reviewing two creative writing program-related new books last week, the NYTimes uses the word "Ponzi". In the headline.

From the review, on Mark McGurl's The Program Era:

The actual process of tuition is hard to generalize about, so his book is, instead, full of incomprehensible diagrams, theoretical analysis and sentences like “Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis."

The review is a little more forgiving for Tin House's The Writer's Notebook.