Funding Crisis Strikes J-Schools

By: Mark Fitzgerald At state colleges and universities across the nation, journalism schools are coping with their worst public financing crisis ever -- just as student demand is hitting peaks not seen since the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein filled Newswriting 101 classrooms with thousands of kids a generation ago.

Journalism students returning to campus for the new school year are finding fewer teachers and fewer available classes. Aspiring j-majors are discovering that entry into many programs has become so competitive that they can't get in unless they have the kind of grades once expected only of pre-med students. And at one state-supported institution, Texas A&M University, students are returning to a journalism program that is likely going out of business.

Some journalism educators say Texas A&M's fate may await other schools. "I think we're going to see fewer journalism programs," Will Norton Jr., dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska, says flatly. Norton, vice president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC), sees schools that for reasons of budget or academic politics have largely abandoned teaching the professional skills of journalism in favor of more philosophical ruminations about media theory, and he predicts a rocky future for them: "If you're not preparing students for the profession, your program might disappear."

Even state j-schools that are widely recognized as the best in the nation say they are hurting in an economic downturn now aggravated by legislative budget cutters who must cope with their states' spiraling deficits. Deans at state colleges joke mordantly among themselves about the collapse of their public funding.

"We at this campus have gotten whacked, as have all other journalism programs at what I increasingly call the 'former public universities,'" says Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. "We're looking at a real turning point in American higher education. It's become clear that the public, through their legislators, is not supporting higher education the way they once did.... We need to re-think what public universities are, because they are no longer state-supported universities: As the joke goes, they are state-located universities, at best." To partially compensate for their shrinking state support, Mizzou raised tuition 20% this year. Out-of-state students, who comprise 40% of j-majors on the Columbia, Mo., campus, now face tuition bills that can be as high as $16,000 a year -- making the school as expensive as many private universities.

All across the nation, j-schools are bleeding from state budget cuts. At Colorado University in Boulder, the integrated marketing major in journalism has been dropped. The traditional print journalism program at California State University, Chico, has been hugely popular among students throughout the state in recent years, but when they return this fall, they'll have a harder time getting into such basic classes as newswriting because the school doesn't have the money to replace faculty who have retired or moved on. Down the Pacific coast, the University of California system's only undergraduate journalism program, on the campus of UC Santa Cruz, barely escaped complete elimination for this academic year.

At the University of Illinois, the College of Communications has lost two full-time faculty positions, and the state funding that paid graduate assistants to conduct newswriting lab sessions was eliminated completely. As a result, at least three elective courses have been dropped and the number of students who can take newswriting has been cut to 120 from 160. Through all of last year, the Illinois j-school did not have anyone doing placement full-time. Instead, grad assistants and faculty members took turns helping students find jobs. Ron Yates, the journalism program head who is also serving as the college's interim dean, managed to find the funds to get a placement person, no thanks to the Illinois legislature. "We really got whacked," he says. "We have lost 17% of our budget in the last two years. That's a huge chunk of money."

It isn't just students who are feeling the pinch. Faculty at the University of Kansas' William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications received no raise at all in 2002, and just a 1% increase this year. Still, they are faring better than their colleagues at Arizona State University, where the faculty of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunications hasn't received an across-the-board pay raise in three years.

No vacancy

What the budget cutters have not reduced is student demand for journalism classes, which is swelling nationwide. "We're bursting at the seams," says Stephen K. Doig, the Knight chair in journalism and interim director of Arizona State's j-school. Like many journalism programs, Arizona State requires students to apply for admission. The number of students is capped at a generous 600, but the school still turns away about 20% of applicants. Smaller programs must be even more selective. UC Santa Cruz, for instance, averages three applicants for each spot in its classes.

Missouri tried for many years to keep a cap of about 650 undergrads in its program, but two years ago it agreed to take 770 and by last winter it was over the 800 mark, says Mills: "Our problem is too many great kids." Indeed, j-school deans across the nation say that the quality of students has increased dramatically in recent years, to the point that some worry their programs may become too exclusive.

"We're very hot on this campus. We have to turn away students," says Illinois' Yates. Students apply for admission to the college for their junior year. The minimum requirement is a 3.0 grade point average (GPA), but last year the average GPA for those admitted to one of the 600 spots was 3.3. Nearly 100 applicants were rejected. Yates, a former foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, says he keeps some spots open for those who may not make a dean's list: "We've all known people in the newsroom who may not be the best academically, but have those other qualities that make a good journalist, and I don't want to lose them."

Student demand explains another paradox of journalism education at state institutions these days: Though budget cutting threatens the scope and even the existence of more j-programs than ever, increasing numbers of j-schools are clamoring for the recognition that comes from ACEJMC accreditation. Susanne Shaw, a University of Kansas journalism professor, has been executive director of the ACEJMC since 1986. In that time, she says, the number of accredited journalism programs has increased to 105 from 85. Another seven programs are on the council's waiting list, seeking accreditation.

A new development

With public funding for journalism collapsing (at Illinois, for instance, state money accounts for just 29% of operating expenses), the job definition of a dean at a state j-school has been radically redefined. "A contemporary dean absolutely has to be raising money. That wasn't as important 10 to 15 years ago... but an increasing proportion of operating funds has to come from private rather than public sources," says Trevor R. Brown, the dean since 1984 of the School of Journalism at Indiana University. Adds Kansas professor Shaw: "When schools interview for a dean, they want to know, have you raised funds, and how much have you raised?"

That certainly was what Western Kentucky University wanted to know before it chose Pam McAllister-Johnson as the new director of its School of Journalism and Broadcasting. The school has just moved into a brand-new $18.5 million facility, and it wants McAllister-Johnson to fill it with privately funded talent. "My goal is to get a chair for the sequences," she says. But that's not all: There's naming rights to the building to be funded, and other profit centers to develop. Western Kentucky has already started a public relations agency and a photography studio that use, and pay, j-school students.

Development, as the professionals like to call fund raising, has become dramatically more difficult in the past few years. Consider the experience of Nebraska. Until the stock market collapse, the j-school's endowment fund had grown an astonishing 1,300% since 1990. "So those stock revenues are down, obviously," says Dean Norton, "and what keeps us going are our alumni who really appreciate the education they got. Much of our money is just little $25 gifts, and I'm so grateful for them."

Ohio State University's School of Journalism and Communication, which has about 250 of its 760 undergrads majoring in its new "public affairs journalism focus," caught a break recently when the estate of a private individual agreed to endow a journalism chair. More frequently, j-schools compete for funds from such longtime journalism education supporters as the McCormick Tribune Foundation or the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which since 1990 has endowed 17 Knight chairs, mostly at state-supported j-schools. "Everyone is going after the same foundation money," says ACEJMC Executive Director Shaw.

The money chase has public j-school deans looking enviously at their private college peers. "We're not like (Northwestern University's) Medill, which is sitting on gobs of money," says Illinois Interim Dean Yates, in a comment that was echoed by several other deans.

Death and Texas

If there's an increasing urgency to the fund raising by state j-schools, it's because they hear reports of faltering programs at other public universities. The most dramatic example is Texas A&M University, whose 50-year-old journalism department appears doomed. Charles A. Johnson, dean of the liberal arts college that houses the department, has recommended its elimination, and a TAMU blue-ribbon commission late last month suggested stopping the enrollment of new journalism students right now.

True Brown, a student and the summer editor for the university daily newspaper Battalion, started a petition drive to oppose the department's closing that gathered 3,000 signatures even during the nearly deserted summer session. "I see (student opposition) exploding in the fall," he says.

Supporters were briefly buoyed when the university president, former CIA chief Robert Gates, issued a statement Aug. 25 saying he would not make a decision on closing the department until "alternate pathways for journalism education have been developed and fleshed out." Still, in an article by staff writer Craig Kapitan in the local daily, The Eagle of Bryan-College Station, Gates made it clear that the eventual disappearance of the program is "certainly where it is headed."

Journalism educators and former students say the TAMU department is dying not so much because of budget cuts, but because it strangled on its own popularity; at one point not long ago, it had 900 students and just eight full-time faculty. The department hasn't had a permanent chairman in three years, and lost support inside its own college.

That is a formula for a weak program, says Indiana Dean Brown: "So much depends on where in the university structure the program is located. If it's within a college of arts and sciences, it seems to be more vulnerable to the sorts of things that happened in Texas, when resources get tight. But when it is independent and freestanding, it tends to be less vulnerable to closure."

Sometimes, that structure is more easily desired than achieved. This summer, for instance, the provost of the University of Mississippi rejected a proposal by journalism Chair Stuart Bullion to create a School of Journalism for its 500 journalism majors inside the College of Liberal Arts. "I think these days people almost expect to find journalism in its own school or college," Bullion says. Journalism programs need more resources than other academic departments, he argues, because "we have so many connections outside the department, such as working with high school journalism education, or with news organizations." Still, he says, he doesn't feel any trepidation for journalism's future at Ole Miss: "We get our share, and more, of support from the administration... so we're not looking at budget cutters coming in and demanding our resources."

Of course, a j-school is rarely just a j-school anymore. Increasingly, they offer majors in public relations, advertising, media theory and other specialties, and the number of traditional news-editorial majors may be a minority. Even so, Brown says, journalism remains at the core of any good j-school: "The profession sometimes gets alarmed that these schools have so many people studying PR and advertising. If journalism were being marginalized, I'd be alarmed, too -- but I'm not sure the evidence is there.... And, anyway, do we want huge enrollments in the news-editorial sequences when we're not in an industry that is expanding all that much?"

Brown compares the mix of subjects in contemporary journalism schools to the editorial mix of a typical newspaper, which includes crossword puzzles, comics and gardening columns along with hard news and political opinion. "Frankly, I'm tired of being lectured that journalism schools are somehow impure by offering PR and advertising," he says.

Credit to their profession?

Even as more schools pursue accreditation, some universities -- including Wisconsin, California State University, Fresno and University of Michigan -- are dropping the recognition as they take their programs in non-traditional directions. Ohio State's public affairs journalism focus is one example. Carroll J. Glynn, director of the School of Journalism and Communication, says the number and quality of j-students has remained high since Ohio State announced two years ago it was dropping ACEJMC accreditation. Now even the parents have stopped calling: "I might get one or two (calls) a year, something like that."

Glynn says the school has had no problem placing its students in internships. But the hometown daily is not so thrilled with the changes at the school. "We are hiring fewer interns from Ohio State than we had previously, because the better candidates are coming from Ohio University and Miami University [of Ohio] and Kent State University," says Columbus Dispatch Editor Ben Marrison. "Ohio State has not kept pace with those schools."

Like many other newspaper professionals, though, Marrison wishes j-schools in general would do a better job teaching some of the freshest challenges facing the industry: "They're not doing as much convergence at universities as there ought to be, or as much computer-assisted reporting or as much Internet journalism -- and, of course, all that's resource-driven."

Writing in the 'real world'

At the same time, news professionals increasingly value a formal journalism education. Loren Steffy, the Dallas bureau chief for Bloomberg News and president of the Texas A&M Former Journalism Students Association (FJSA), says he emphasized that value when he and other professionals met to try to convince TAMU educators to keep the journalism program: "If I've got somebody who is a good reporter, we (at Bloomberg) can teach him the financial stuff pretty easily... What's much more difficult is teaching them journalism: How to cover an event, how to get the right quote, how to bang out a story, all that stuff. People who have a journalism education have a lot better chance of hitting the ground running when they come on to the job."

That's the way another Texas A&M alum, Houston Chronicle Page One Editor Paul McGrath, feels: "Journalism schools really can go a long way towards preparing kids for life outside the walls of academia. Life in the real world, I call it."