Is J-School Worth It?
Opportunities for hands-on learning, but payoff is not guaranteed
After she graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1992 with a degree in English, Shalmali Pal faced a tough decision. The Los Angeles native knew that she wanted to be a journalist, but her credentials were marginal at best--a few movie reviews written for the Daily Bruin, the UCLA campus newspaper. That alone, she knew, was not enough to land her a job in the shrinking and highly competitive world of print journalism. The expensive solution: an investment of one year's time and $20,000 of her parents' money for a master's degree at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Ambivalence. Today, Pal works as a reporter in a suburban bureau of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a position she feels she owes in large measure to her graduate degree. "I could not have projected the same confidence if I had not gone to journalism school," says Pal, now 26. But in almost the same breath, she concedes that in journalism school "there's nothing they are going to teach you that you can't learn in the workplace."
While many aspiring reporters, to say nothing of many experienced editors, share Pal's ambivalence about journalism school, growing numbers of young people are hoping that in a tight job market a master's degree in journalism will help them to launch--or advance--their careers. As a result, enrollment in the nation's 171 journalism and mass communications master's programs grew by 25 percent between 1990 and 1994, to more than 10,000. While earning an advanced degree is no guarantee of a job, a survey by Northwestern's Medill School found that more than two thirds of the 170 students who received an M.S. at the school in 1994 were working as print, broadcast or online journalists. "When it comes to filling newsrooms with the best talents, they are coming through journalism school," contends Neil Brown, managing editor of the St. Petersburg Times.
At the best schools, graduate students not only are taught basic journalistic skills but also are thrust into real-life professional situations. For example, when Kara Choquette, 23, attended the journalism school on the Columbia campus of the University of Missouri, she covered Boonville, a small town near the university, for the Columbia Missourian, a full-fledged daily newspaper owned and operated by the school. Choquette reported on the town's efforts to attract a casino riverboat as well as on the closing of a local sports-apparel plant. "What you learn in a small community, you can use anywhere," says Choquette, now a copy editor at the Gannett-owned Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y.
On the air. Those who envision on-air careers in television have comparable opportunities in some graduate programs. At Missouri, for example, students get firsthand exposure to radio and television because the school operates both the local National Public Radio affiliate and the town's NBC station. Students write, report and produce the morning and evening newscasts. After each show, professors critique their work. "The newsrooms are the crucibles in which we hope to mold future journalists," declares George Kennedy, a professor at the University of Missouri.
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