J-school enrollment high despite dwindling jobs

Job seekers fill the convention floor on Thursday, Aug. 13. | Daniel Sato / Voices

By Patrick Lee
Voices

Last year, newsrooms saw the biggest plunge in employment in 32 years – a loss of 5,900 jobs at U.S. daily papers.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Labor announced the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent, the highest in 26 years.

Last week, 272 students began preparing for classes at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

More than 1,100 students applied to the program for this fall, a 44 percent increase from 2008. This surge in applications reflects growing numbers of students at graduate journalism schools across the country over the last decade. In the fall of 2007, the year with the most recently available data, national enrollment in journalism and mass communications programs jumped by 10.3 percent – the highest increase since 2000.

But why are students flocking to an industry that is crumbling before their eyes?

Steve Brill puts it bluntly: “I think people are just behaving stupidly.”

Brill – founder of American Lawyer and co-founder of Journalism Online, a new company aimed at helping publishers generate revenue by charging for online content – says the cost-benefit analysis simply doesn’t add up: Thousands of dollars in tuition for a chance to gain entry into a field of closing doors.

But for the upcoming generation of journalists, it still seems too early to give up. Several recent college graduates interviewed said to break into journalism, they would be willing to work multiple jobs, parlay their skills into social media enterprises or – as evidenced by the numbers – go back to school.

“There’s something new to learn for the first time, probably since the advent of television, and that’s the advent of digital journalism,” explained Steve Shepard, founding dean of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

CUNY has also seen a 40 percent increase in applications for this fall, the biggest jump since the school opened in 2006.

A year ago, however, graduate school was not even on Juana Summers’ list of post-college options. A convergence journalism major at the University of Missouri with three semesters until graduation, Summers felt she was well-qualified for a wide array of journalism jobs and that graduate school would be overdoing it. But when she started job-hunting this summer, her options proved to be more limited than she had planned.

“The majority is freelancing, unpaid,” said Summers, currently an intern at the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman. “That’s not what I’m looking for.”

With the final semester of her undergraduate years looming over her, she has started seriously considering journalism graduate school as a way to defer undergraduate student loans for a few years, wait out the industry and make herself an even more competitive job candidate.

Lee Becker, a journalism professor and researcher at the University of Georgia, would point out that Summers’ situation is not unique. He has collected journalism-related statistics since 1988, and the job market figures for 2008, released on the first day of the AAJA Convention, show as dire a picture as ever.

“I can tell you that the market is much worse than it was last year,” he said. “We don’t know if students will simply shift and go into PR or advertising or something like that, or whether they will go into engineering or some other kind of occupation.”

For some, journalism school offers a safe environment to refine reporting skills, test new technologies and brainstorm new ways to make journalism profitable online.

“What better place to experiment than at an academic level where all great minds are coming together to figure that out?” said Vadim Lavrusik, an incoming graduate student at Columbia. “Plus, not that many people are hiring right now.”

Lavrusik, who graduated in the spring with a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota, is betting that $40,000 of tuition for 10 months of school will help him figure out how to get paid to report for an online publication, despite the state of the industry. Others, like Laura Bennett, applied to graduate programs because it was the only path that could provide her with a semblance of stability in an industry with no easy entry point.

“J-school is structured: You take classes, you write papers, you get grades, you graduate,” she said in an e-mail. “Journalism, needless to say, is not.”

Having just graduated from Yale, Bennett deferred her acceptance to Columbia’s graduate program to pursue a Fulbright scholarship in Spain. In one year’s time, she said, her decision on whether to attend graduate school will be wholly based on the job prospects she has – or doesn’t have – upon her return.

While the uptick of interest in journalism has some experts puzzled, others say vocational decisions don’t always depend on job market. Some decisions, said Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs and new media professor at Columbia, simply stem from an individual’s desire to make sense of their surroundings through journalism.

“After 9/11, we saw a spike in interest in journalism because people wanted to go in and explain the world,” he said. “This is another time I think we’re going to see more interest in business journalism, see more interest in explaining complex issues, politics.”

And that’s the spirit incoming student Lavrusik exudes when he talks about his reasons for pursuing journalism. A self-proclaimed “new media journalist, social media enthusiast,” Lavrusik’s passion lies in telling stories about what goes on around him – and hopefully finding a way to make money doing so, even if it takes a $40,000 investment upfront.

“I’m sure I’ll figure it out during the school year,” he said. “We’ll see where things take me.”

This entry was posted on August 14, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Voices 2009. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.