Lots of people go to grad school for the wrong reasons. My brother, who has a JD but no longer practices, has made it his mission in life to dissuade as many aspiring law-school applicants as he can. And rightly so. Far too many liberal-arts grads assume law school is the only answer to the question, “What do you do with a BA in English?”
Meanwhile, New York magazine is reporting on journalism schools, specifically Columbia, experiencing yet another “existential crisis.” (For those keeping score, this is the 54,978th such crisis in the last 30 years.) And, of course, business schools are grappling with the fact that the main industry to which they have funneled most of their graduates has suddenly imploded.
I think the fundamental problem these programs are facing is that, as professional schools, they were set up to train graduates in a profession. Lawyer. Journalist. Banker. Marketer. The problem is, the definitions of those jobs are not only changing, they’re blurring together. It’s not just that journalists need to know how to use Twitter or Flash, it’s that they need to stop thinking of themselves only as reporters or editors and start thinking of themselves as businesspeople, marketers and publicists. (Or, as a TV news exec at a conference I attended last week said, “We’re looking for human Swiss Army knives.”)
I have a somewhat similar goal as my brother whenever I interview potential interns or recent grads who hope to one day become a magazine editor. It’s not so much that I try to talk them out of that career as I encourage them to broaden their horizons a little and realize there are job descriptions beyond the traditional ones that they may have never considered. Furthermore, the days when they could happily spend their days writing and let others worry about business considerations are long gone. To be strictly a journalist is, almost by definition, to be a cost center, and to be a cost center is to put your career prospects at the mercy of others.
If Columbia really wants to help its j-school grads, the best thing it could do is teach them how not to be journalists.
