No Holds Barred Attack on Journalism School

by Andrew Gillen

Richard Sine writes a brutal piece about journalism schools:

These kids are paying upwards of $70,000 (the cost of Columbia's J-School, including living expenses) for a ghost's chance of landing a job, at pitiful pay, in an industry that is rapidly collapsing. What's going to be the next hot field in graduate study? Blacksmithing? Bloodletting? Steamship design?...

Most J-school enrollees know this already: They go for the "contacts" thought to be essential in a competitive field. This made sense a few years ago. These days, it's like boarding the Titanic in hopes of meeting the captain...

If I asked you to pay $70,000 to get ahead in some other glamorous, extremely competitive, fairly non-technical profession — say, modeling — you might call me a charlatan. But journalism has become ensconced as an academic discipline at otherwise respectable institutions...

Do not charge so much money to walk through the door that the program is open only to the rich, the idle, or the financially illiterate. That's not a journalism school; that's a gold-plated welfare program for your old newsroom buddies, built on the backs of starry-eyed naïfs...

The pointer came from Felix Salmon who adds

If J-school graduates are almost by definition financially naive — if they weren’t financially naive they’d never have spent so much money on J-school — then maybe J-school is only serving to increase the number of innumerates working in journalism. Which is a sobering thought.

For another no holds barred take (this one on Goldman) see this piece by Matt Taibbi.