Comments on: Best Schools for Journalism

By: katy

katy — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:23:57 +0000

Why isn’t NYU on this list? ALso, I don’t see Columbia, or Standford.

By: Jeremy Porter

Jeremy Porter — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 06:20:07 +0000

Thanks for the comment Mia. If Newsweek mentioned them, I’m sure it’s a reliable source. However, I am not familiar with the program.

By: Mia

Mia — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:02:43 +0000

Hi I’m interested in being a Journalism major. I’m just curious to know everyone’s opinion on Bradley U’s J-program (undergraduate). It seems as if it is nowhere near the range of the top 10 schools, unless my assumption is wrong: According to several websites, it was rated as a top J-school by Newsweek. However, no other sources even mention Bradley. Thanks.

By: aw

aw — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:12:38 +0000

How about Indiana University?!

http://journalism.indiana.edu/

Went to Mizzou for a year… transfered to IU because you could start taking j school classes right away, along with your gen-ed classes, unlike Mizzou.

Mizzou, however… great, great journalism school. But so is IU.

Check out the Journalism/abroad internship programs.

By: toh

toh — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:27:41 +0000

St. Bonaventure University is a great choice. They have a bunch of Pulitzer Prize-winners teaching there, and that graduated from Bonas.

Best years of my life.

By: c_writer

c_writer — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:21:38 +0000

I agree that Kent State deserves a spot on this list – especially considering its fully conglomerated state-of-the-art news room and hard-hitting teaching staff.

By: Lisa Cunningham

Lisa Cunningham — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:11:25 +0000

Mindy, I question why people would major in journalism if they don’t intend to work in the field.

Back in the Dark Ages when I majored in journalism, everyone I knew in the newspaper sequence planned to go into newspapers in some way. Those who didn’t never made it to the third year, when you got the major courses.

It’s such a competitive field, and even back in the day, you had to have a journalism degree to get a decent job in the field.

The Conan O’Brien wanna-bes usually majored in broadcast news. I had a couple friends in that major, but only one is still in radio, and has been at the same station for over 30 years! Now that’s rare.

Seems to me that public relations is the most popular major now, but I could be wrong.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:10:14 +0000

I would certainly like to see someone comment here in reply to this question:

Which colleges or universities are leading the way in transforming journalism education? Who are the innovators?

I’d like to say that my school, the University of Florida, is one of the innovators. But I teach there, and I don’t want to see every journalism professor jumping in here and saying Me! Me! Me! What would be much better, in my opinion, would be if some former students (from any j-school) would comment and say specifically what they got at their school — besides writing, reporting and editing — that helped them land a job. Recently. I mean, within the past two years.

That would make interesting reading.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:03:41 +0000

Hm, I might argue that percentage of graduates who (do/achieve … whatever) is not a useful measure for this. Reason: So many journalism graduates never even intended to do any kind of journalism work.

A lot of students major in journalism for personal reasons not related to journalism, such as “I want to be Conan O’Brien when I grow up”; “I want to write the Great American Novel, and my mom won’t let me major in English”; “I want to go to law school, and I think I can get a 4.0 GPA in journalism undergrad.” So can you call the j-school a failure because those guys never work at a journalism job? I’d say no.

The only way to get a useful result would be to survey the graduates on what kind of job they wanted to get. Even then, there would be some discrepancies in the results. The kid who wanted to be a TV news anchor and applied only to big-city TV stations for jobs? No luck there. The kid who wanted to be a movie critic or a political analyst at age 22? No luck, sorry.

So you’d also have to measure whether the graduate’s ambitions were insane, or practical.

By: sportswritergal

sportswritergal — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:47:26 +0000

Bogus method, but love that Bona’s is ranked fifth among journalism schools. http://tinyurl.com/kq3dma #SBU

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