Simply Sunshine

By: jackiereedy

Jul 06 2009

Category: Uncategorized

1 Comment

Best Schools for Journalism <— link to  full article

by Jeremy Porter on July 6, 2009

There’s been a fair amount of chatter lately about whether or not students should enroll in journalism school. If you want to be a journalist someday, it can’t hurt. Do you need a journalism education to be successful? No. Will it prepare you better than a major in English or Biology? Yes.

There are plenty of people that question the value of a journalism education. Others question whether or not journalism programs are keeping up with the pace of change in the industry. Despite the criticism, enrollment is up at journalism schools around the country. So the big question in my mind is which schools are doing the best job at preparing students for a career in a much different media world than many of us grew up in? Which schools are teaching Internet and social media skills, while sticking to a solid foundation of fundamentals? Which schools put the greatest emphasis on quality reporting and writing?

If I were a journalist, I might have spent a month interviewing professors and students. I would have talked to recent grads and students who plan to step onto campus this coming fall. I would have poured over all the research that’s already been done on this subject, and the quality of this post would have been much better. But I’m not a journalist. I’m a blogger. An amateur blogger at that. So I took the easy way out. I asked you, specifically my Twitter followers, to voice your opinion on which journalism school is doing the best job at preparing students for a career in the new world of journalism? 205 votes were cast in my informal poll during the month of June. Based on your votes, the top 10 schools doing the best job at preparing students for a career in journalism are (drum roll please):

1. University of Georgia, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications
2. University of California, Berkley Graduate School of Journalism
3. University of Missouri, Missouri School of Journalism
4. Syracuse University, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
5. St. Bonaventure, The Russell J. Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication
6. Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
7. Northwestern University, Medill
8. UNC-Chapel Hill, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
9. Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University
10. The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism