On whether or not to get a journalism degree

As a graduate of the Carleton School of Journalism, I get a little e-mail in my inbox every Tuesday, which is appropriately titled Tuesday Topics. Yesterday’s edition was fronted with a little piece of news I found interesting, which was later written up for public consumption by a couple of Carleton profs:

Applications to Ontario’s degree programs in Journalism are down compared to this time last year, according to data released last month by the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre in Guelph . . . According to the OUAC website, www.ouac.on.ca, 3,576 applications were received as of July 8 for first-year admission to Journalism programs across the province.  That figure is 13.2 per cent lower than the equivalent last year.

Now, if you couple this with the fact that overall undergraduate applications to Ontario Universities has been steadily rising, it seems as though a reasonable inference here is that interest in an undergraduate journalism education is waning. And why might that be?

“I suspect the drop reflects to some extent the uncertainty in the journalism business as a whole, ” [Carleton journalism undergraduate supervisor Klaus] Pohle says.

The acting chair of Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, Suanne Kelman, agrees the poor job market is responsible for the drop in interest in journalism programs.  In an email she wrote: “Surely fears about future employment would be the major factor. That would explain why applications are down across the province – if it were just us and Carleton, I might assume that the wider range of choices played a more importance (sic) part. I think that students and their parents are being affected by the concerns over the future of journalism.”

Well, no kidding. Since I graduated in 2007, I have worked for three major daily newspapers and not once did I have an actual job with things like benefits. Moreover, I was extremely lucky to be able to score that many internship positions, which are rare and getting rarer. Just to draw from newspapers I worked at, when I was a summer intern at the Edmonton Journal there were seven summer intern spots; now there are four. The Ottawa Citizen used to have six year-long interns at a time, I believe they are down to either one or two. The vast majority of the friends I made in school didn’t even try to work in the journalism industry or, if they did, have already given up and pursued another career path, which, I would be remiss not to mention, they were all aided in by their journalism degree.

To be clear, I loved pretty much everything about my undergraduate experience. The profs at Carleton were fantastic both for imparting knowledge and having working-journalist connections, I made amazing friends, I learned skills of both life and work varieties, etc. So to say all those things and recommend against taking an undergraduate journalism degree would be a pretty dick move, which is why I’m not going to do it. What I am going to do is proffer some advice to people who want to be journalists and are considering an undergraduate journalism degree.

What a journalism undergraduate degree will get you are amazing memories, good connections with profs who know hundreds of working journalists, marketable skills in the form of writing and communications abilities. What it will not get you, and what no one ever promises it will get you, is a job in journalism.

To be clear, in my recollection, no one at j-skool ever lied about this, either. I’m pretty sure that from literally day one, lectures included messages from profs that, if you wanted to get a job in journalism on the other side, then you were going to have to hustle outside of class. A journalism degree on its own is never, ever going to get anyone a job in media. Students newspaper experience, community radio, working for small-town media, free work placements, academic exchanges and, at this point, extra curricular web experience are basically mandatory if you’re interested in hunting for a job.

Now, this was all made clear to us. An interesting counterpoint to that strategy, appropriately enough for this blog, are law schools in the United States. The legal job market in the States tanked during the recession and, accordingly, recent grads are extremely hard pressed to find work, not unlike journalism grads in Canada. There are several key differences, though, particularly that there’s a large movement in the States that put forward that American law schools actively lie to potential students about hiring rates to “trick” them into paying exorbitant, six-figure amounts for their degree. (Another key difference there being that  you can get a whole undergraduate journalism degree for less than the cost of one year at an American law school.) Some people view it as so bad that they are apparently willing to go on a hunger strike in a bid to get American law schools to be more transparent about hiring figures and job market realities.

So, you know, on the bright side, no Canadian journalism graduate that I’m aware of has voluntarily starved themselves because they couldn’t get a media job and felt that it was their school’s fault. But that doesn’t mean it’s not exceedingly challenging to score a media job. This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t apply for undergraduate journalism degrees, it just means that, if they want to be a journalist, they should be aware of what’s in store and adjust expectations appropriately.