MFA versus ?

In a talk today at George Mason's spring "New Leaves" book festival the question came up about the value of an MFA for fiction and nonfiction writers as opposed to not doing an MFA. One year when I was a judge for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction I met Patrick Hemingway and we had a conversation about his father. He said his father attended the University of Paris, and I said, well, I don't remember any mention of that in any of the biographies. He said, Yes, he studied with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson.
Makes me suggest that the MFA is well worth it if you can find good enough instructors to work with for the intensive--and intense--few years it takes to gain that degree. The degree itself means less than what the apprentice writer takes away from the workshops and classes with writers whose work he or she finds admirable and worthwhile. Think of two or three years as time gained--at the minimum--of learning some short cuts to finishing work at hand. In a good MFA program I think that two or three years might possibly take the place of five or six or seven years, say, revising in the dark, trying in some instances to reinvent the wheel.