Ron Silliman has a post up about how unread young (graduate level) poetry students are.  He's critical without being condemnatory:

These folks are not dunderheads, not in the slightest, but unless you’ve had John Taggart as a teacher (one of my students has), studied at one of a handful of identifiable schools like SUNY Buffalo, Brown, Bard, Temple, Penn, Mills, Wayne State or UC San Diego, or are some kind of manic autodidact, your chances of entering a graduate school program with even a remote understanding of the history of American poetry over the past half century are pretty minimal.

He suggests that students take a year off (to read) before going to graduate school, and that schools require students to write a critical or historical paper.  I disagree with the first suggestion, mostly because taking a year off can make it difficult to go back to school, and if you weren't very well-read in college, the chances of you rectifying this in a year are slim.  On the second count, I agree.  My alma mater Purdue requires this, and I think criticism and literary history could probably be stressed more throughout a writing program, especially at the undergraduate level.

I wrote a defense of MFA programs a little while ago, if you're interested in this sort of thing.