What exactly is the value of a journalism degree? Are J-schools really preparing students for the media jobs of the future? The questions aren’t new, but they’ve come up again in connection with the selection of a new dean for Columbia’s prestigious graduate school of journalism.
If you haven’t read it, Michael Wolff’s take in USA Today is about as blunt as it gets. He chastises the school for hiring Steve Coll as dean, calling him “another New Yorker writer, one who…has never tweeted in his life.” As Wolff sees it, Columbia is utterly out of touch with today’s news business and its needs.
The disgrace is not just that the school takes students’ or their parents’ money to train them for a livelihood that it reasonably can predict will not exist. But it is also an intellectual failure: The information marketplace is going through a historic transformation, involving form, distribution, business basis and cognitive effect, and yet Columbia has just hired a practitioner to lead it with little or no career experience in any of these epochal changes.
Not entirely true, writes David Carr in the New York Times, who gives Columbia credit for “aggressive moves into new forms of journalistic expression.” But he too slams journalism education in general as a con game. “Having seen many journalism programs up close, I can say that most are escalators to nowhere,” Carr says.
Harsh, right? But not the whole story. Just ask the recruiters who show up every year at Columbia’s J-school and others looking for new hires. According to Crain’s NY Business digital skills gained from reputable schools may be the edge that journalists need to compete in a shrinking job market.”
So maybe the J-schools are doing something right. If so, why would Columbia’s new dean say he’s thinking about adding a year to the school’s one-year master’s program? The school currently has a second year program focused on specific topics, but it’s optional. The core MS program at Columbia costs close to $85,000, as it is, including tuition, fees and living expenses. Even if you accept that the one-year program is worth that kind of money, I have to wonder what would make a two-year masters worth twice as much. Weigh in, please.
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4 Comments
As the director of a small but growing journalism program at the University of Toronto, we are experiencing a steady increase in applications. Even if the outcome of an honors BA in Journalism doesn’t quickly lead to a cushy editor’s job at the Toronto Star, these students are remarkably clear-headed (and wonderfully idealistic) about the value of journalism in our society. The skills and qualities they will acquire (skepticism, analysis, curiosity, contextualization) are transferable to other areas including law, business and medicine which is where some of our graduates find themselves. None has ever expressed any regret (to me at any rate) over learning why journalism and citizenship need to be so closely connected. We aren’t “just” teaching journalism. We are teaching media literacy.
As a successful former major market and network journalist (and a news director who never went to J-School) — and now a communications consultant — I can say that in theory J-School DOES have its value if placed in proper context. Just as a law degree can have immense value in several industry sectors even if you never take the Bar or practice law, a J-School degree from the proper program should teach invaluable skills — judgment, alacrity, clear writing and content creation, analytical and critical thinking skills, listening, research, multi-media, and not the least, journalism. Don’t laugh. Having operated in the top-tier business, non-profit, association, NGO advocacy and government spheres since leaving my network producer job, I have seen a frightening dearth of all of those traits in my professional interactions. Communications is the language of leadership, period, and trained journalists should be outstanding communicators if they received the proper training that addresses today’s instant electronic communications environment. Don’t look at J-school as a pathway to a reporter’s job in the traditional sense; look at it as a training ground in leadership skills for both the real and virtual worlds. Technology and media are vehicles; communications is a skill and an art.