From the point of view of the student, yes they should provide the skills to be a journalist, but I guess I’m saying that’s not all that they provide, which is why journalism graduates are able to enter any number of other careers – either because they decide they do not want to become a journalist after all (once they discover the wage, for example), or because they simply turn out not to be good enough, or because there aren’t any jobs.

Like you say, fascinating discussion – there’s a wider issue here about whether higher education should be tied to the existing industrial landscape or whether we should be allowing people to study things that they love, regardless of the employment prospects in that area. I think the latter has wider benefits than short-term economic ones. Today’s journalism graduates may not all go into the publishing industry now, but may do so later, or use their skills for all manner of unforeseen applications (for example web startups, or amateur blogs scrutinising local power).

It’s your basic idea that journalism degrees don’t just exist to ‘just’ to train people to enter the news industry that bothers me.

Why? Well, in essence I think institutions and students have an ever-diverging idea of what’s being delivered and why.

Students, overwhelmingly, study journalism and college, university or training centres because they want to work in ‘journalism’ in its widest sense, be that in print (papers and magazines in their many guises), online, in radio and television, or in PR or publishing. Their prime assumption is that the course they choose will prepare them for that, make them useful and, crucially, employable in their chosen field.

I think the list of other skills you list which people will pick up on a journalism degree are all fine. No great issue with them at all – but there is a very clear difference between the scenarion where a student picks a journalism degree because they want to work in journalism and a scenario where a student picks a journalism degree because they want to “build core academic skills such as research, conceptual knowledge and critical skills” etc etc.

I’d also add that practical courses, which do have a clear focus on training people for a profession, don’t automatically fail to educate or to deliver the many things in your list.

Perhaps the question really isn’t ‘Are there too many journalism courses?’ (Yes, by the way), but really should be ‘Are there too many journalism courses that arene’t good enough and mislead students along the way’.

Either way, fascinating discussion.

Surely if you ask most people why they want to study journalism their first response will always be: “Because I want to be a journalist.”

In short, they expect to be trained towards a specific career. It’s all well and good to mention many degrees that don’t lead to a specific job – but how many journalism undergrads expect that of a journalism course?

I’m sorry to say that this does strike me as a get out of jail free card for courses that are failing to provide what prospective journalists want and what the industry (in its many facets) needs.

When I was in college, I took what interested me. I had enough English electives to declare a double major. I have a double minor in psych and French. I hated history and political science. Took as little as necessary. And I need them.

I struggle when writing recession stories. Economics and business courses would have been useful. Same for criminal justice. I’ve taught myself web design, which is why I stayed up all night last night trying to change a WordPress CSS template by trial and error. Yes, I can do it. It wouldn’t take as long if I knew what I was doing. Same for multimedia. I’m teaching myself, but I’m constantly worried I’m not learning fast enough or well enough.

I write national news, but my education is slanted to art, literature, journalism, photography, languages. I can’t afford to return to school, and lately I feel the overwhelming gaps in my education. I wish I’d realized how much I was mucking up college. Hindsight is 20/20.