Graduating from Harvard and being raised poor by a single mother are not mutually exclusive conditions.
To be a good journalist you have to be intellectually curious about a lot of different subjects. You have to be a top-notch critical thinker. You have to be comfortable talking to all kinds of people. You have to be a decent writer and get your thoughts across succinctly and clearly. So, journalism is a self-selecting field.
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But does the market demand good journalism?
The editors do. You have to get hired.
^^^^ depends on how you define elite. 400 different universities for top 1000 CEOs.
Note that the study counted both grad school and undergrad, so you don’t have to have done well in HS (and be able to pay), but you generally do have to do well somewhere along the way.
BTW, I daresay that a disproportionate of journalists/opinion-setters do come from privileged backgrounds (compared to, say, the software field). Ronan Farrow and Anderson Cooper do good work, but both came from famous and rich families.
To be a journalist at the New York Times or the Washington Post, you have to be very ambitious, which incidentally is a helpful quality to have when applying to college. The fact that journalism is getting increasingly more competitive because they’re laying people off probably increases the proportion of elite school graduates. Finally, there are people at elite schools from West Virginia, so I’m not really sure what that has to do with anything.
Making @blossom 's point…My offspring attended a public magnet in NYC. A number of its graduates are journalists. In many cases, this means I know something about their backgrounds because like many such schools it brags about the successes of its alumni.
There was a young man a good number of years ahead of my D at the high school whose parents were Chinese immigrants. His father drove a cab. He did NOT own the cab himself, but drove for a fleet. They lived in Flushing (Queens) Chinatown. At a school where everyone is smart, the son was regarded as brilliant. He went on to Harvard. He then studied in the UK on a Marshall Scholarship.
While he was at Harvard, he was one of the two undergraduates per year who are chosen to write monthly columns for the alumni magazine about the undergraduate experience.These positions are usually given to students who are already acknowledged as unusually good writers. One of the other accolades he received was being chosen to speak at commencement.
His father was very proud of this and mentioned it at work. Someone told his boss. His boss said something to him about scheduling, assuming that he’d take the day off. He wasn’t planning to do so, as this was in the days before the cheap Chinatown buses from NYC to Boston and he and his wife didn’t own a car and couldn’t afford the trip. The boss was flabbergasted.He learned that the driver and his wife had never visited Harvard. So, he told the driver dad to take one of the cabs and go to graduation. So, dad did.
The son wrote about it as his last undergraduate column for the Harvard alumni magazine. His parents helped him carry his things out of the dorm and pack them in the cab. His classmates and their parents kept stopping to congratulate him on his speech and he’d try to introduce his parents. He couldn’t get most of them to wrap their heads around the fact that the cab driver was his father; they kept thinking his mother had hired a cab to drive her to Harvard and drive her back with her son. As he tried to help his dad pack the cab with his belongings, parents would actually say “Just let the cab driver do that.” Eventually, they got the cab packed and left. He wrote about the people who stared at the NYC yellow cab driving along on I-95.
He also wrote about reflecting on his life vs that of his father. He would soon be off to study in the UK. His father, who was every bit as smart as he was, would be driving a cab day after day. His father had always been proud of his son’s accomplishments and never once did his father complain that he had never had such opportunities. When they got home, the son did the only thing he could think of to thank his father. He grabbed the cab keys and drove his father’s next shift.
Today, that young man is the international news editor of the NY Times. Yes, he went to Harvard, but his upbringing certainly wasn’t affluent.
A great many prominent journalists and opinion writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post came from fairly modest or middle-class backgrounds. Some went on to elite colleges as undergrads, others did not. Some acquired elite credentials by virtue of graduate studies in journalism at Columbia or Northwestern (Medill School of Journalism) after undergraduate studies at less exalted institutions. Many worked their way up to the Post or the Times after honing their journalism skills at less prominent publications.
These people are American success stories, exemplars of upward mobility with a boost from higher education. And while the Times and the Post pay better than most newspapers, journalism isn’t a profession one goes into to become rich. It’s a tough, competitive business, and many fail at it, or spend their entire careers laboring in the backwaters. It should be no surprise that, as the saying goes, “the cream rises.”
^ Yes, top people rise to the top of their industry. As it should be (actually nothing should be, it just is). A large percentage of these top people go to top schools, not all of them, but a lot of them. Why wouldn’t they?
At the end of the day, the papers and networks want very bright people who can communicate via their medium. LACs and other top schools produce a lot of that talent (a lot of it is already quite talented when they arrive on campus).
From a recruiting perspective, why wouldn’t you spend your time and money at the schools known for producing great results? If a really bright kid from state U applies and writes a great cover letter will you interview him? Sure. Will s/he get the job? Maybe. But for every one of those, there are 10 (or more) equally bright kids from the elite schools applying (because that’s who goes to elite schools). The recruiter or editor or VP of Fin or whoever’s job isn’t to make sure their ranks are representative of the general population. It’s to simply higher the most qualified candidate who is most likely to do the best job.
@jonri Thanks for sharing the great story. I wonder how many of the upper-middle class kids from the elite schools go into journalism. There are probably no Jared Kushners in the NYT or WSJ.
Yes they do, but they are not representative of journalism as a whole. If you don’t work in the field, very few journalists are visible to you. It’s not just the story writers with bylines and the on-air reporters and broadcasters with their own shows. It’s researchers, all levels of editors, data journalists, and producers.
@brantly I saw Anderson Cooper on Jeopardy’s celebrity series. He was embarrassingly bad.
“What is news here exactly?”
I think the news is that, contrary to the common narrative on CC, at least in some professions it can be a significant boost to your career prospects to have a degree from a high-end school, and/or it can be a drag on your career if you don’t.
Getting on the Supreme Court has been held out as an obvious exception to the “elite degree not needed” narrative, but that’s a profession so small and rarefied as to be completely irrelevant to pretty much everybody - an exception that proves the rule, so to speak.
But unlike Supreme Court justices, pretty much every city has journalists, and this article basically documents that it apparently really helps to have a degree from a high-end college if you aspire to work at a high-end newspaper.
I haven’t done a count, but my own impression from scanning the staff bios on npr.org is that high-end colleges are over-represented at NPR too. So I’d bet that the trend applies beyond just the NYT and WSJ mentioned in the piece. But I would also bet that the trend does not extend to all levels of journalism. I’m thinking a lot of small town and local newspapers are heavily staffed from the nearby state colleges and universities.
Yes, that is true small town newspapers are not going to be staffed by graduates of elite colleges.
Here’s a generalization: I posit that the school is a proxy for the type of people interested in journalism. Not that media outlets are seeking graduates of those universities (any more than any other profession, anyway).
I doubt it, there are many schools that have journalism majors, and if you read into the article you would see that most of them didn’t even major in journalism. I’m sorry but your posit just doesn’t hold water.
Not quite sure what you mean.
I just read it twice again and didn’t see anything about the study subjects’ majors. Did I miss it?
Most journalists did not major in journalism. Besides, I can think of only one “elite” school that has a journalism major—Northwestern. For sure, people who hire journalists do not give two hoots about an undergrad degree in journalism anyway. All they care about are your clips. Majoring in journalism is one way to accumulate clips, but certainly not the only way.
As with as any other industry, the top news outlets look for the top students. A heavy concentration of them can be found at the top universities. It’s a combination of top students wanting to work at the top companies, therefore seeking top universities and the universities doing a fine job preparing the kids (resources beyond teaching but the teaching is really good too). It becomes a closed loop - top student attends top university, does well and gets hired by top company, company likes results and revisits top university for new recruits.