Teaching Journalism

As universities everywhere focus on attracting and retaining students at a time when college-age populations are declining, they are not doing enough to ensure those students get a quality education, according to an article just published in The Chronicle for Higher Education.

In a piece called "A Perfect Storm for Higher Education," an associate professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, who uses the pen name Thomas Benton,  outlines how recent trends in higher education are undermining how much students learn.

"Politicians and the public are quick to blame college faculty members for the decline in learning, but professors—like all teachers—are working in a context that has been created largely by others: Few people outside of higher education understand how little control professors actually have over what students can learn."

Benton identifies some of the reasons college degrees in the U.S. don't have the same value they once did. Many Canadian educators will agree that some of the same problems exist here, too.

Technology is taking over the curriculum at too many j-schools and the results are "disastrous," accorinding to a well-known journalism educator and the author of the widely-used News Reporting and Writing, now in it's 12th edition.

Melvin Mencher says instruction in basic reporting and writing, journalism history and ethics is being squeezed by the growing number of tech-related courses, in a story published at About.com:Journalism.

"How you can have a curriculum that's limited to 30 hours and stuff it with things like how to make a video and or create a blog?" he says in a phone interview. "What the hell does that have to do with the basics of reporting?"

Mencher wonders why more journalism faculty don't resist the shift and suggests that too many of them have spent too much time earning PhDs and too little time in newsrooms.

A recent and successful Carleton journalism graduate says j-school has a lot to offer students these days, but not the one thing most of them want - a job in journalism. 

Laura Drake graduated from Carleton University's School of Journalism in 2007 and has worked for three major daily newspapers in Canada.

In a column at macleans.ca she offers some advice to those who want to go to j-school.

"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."