Insane Surge in J-School Applications
If you apply for expensive training in a dying profession, why should anyone trust your abilities to collect and analyze information?
Newspapers are closing and laying people off; magazines are firing people left and right; even online publishers are gloomy. So naturally writers are flocking to journalism schools: Enrollment is up 38 percent, 20 percent and 6 percent at Columbia, Stanford and NYU, respectively, Forbes.com reports.
The average annual cost to attend is $31,000. The average journalist with a graduate degree earned $40,000 per year — before the financial meltdown began in the fall.
Industry professionals tended to have serious doubts about the value of a graduate journalism degree even before the industry was upended by the internet. These days, when the practice of journalism (out in the real world) is undergoing particularly rapid change, some journalism schools have become havens for reflexively hostile reactionaries, from the University of California, Berkeley to Columbia "Fuck New Media" University.
Apparently people will pay large sums for training at such institutions, the economy be damned. Given their financial instincts, one should pray — for what's left of the profession — they won't be the ones running the journalism organizations of the future.
