Also, remember that 50% people do NOT come from top universities.
You’re right - so there are chances for people from more “normal” universities. However, 50% of people come from the top 1% of Universities. That is quite an advantage to have.
@yikesyikesyikes, counting grad and undergrad, however, and note that pretty much all the top research U’s have as many or more grad students than undergrads and also the vast majority have grad programs that are easier to get in to than their traditional undergrad program.
Thus, it’s not unheard of for someone who didn’t attend a name-brand undergrad program to go collect an elite degree after they had started working.
An example is Bill O’Reilly, who was one of the most powerful people in media. He went to Marist for undergrad then got a masters from BU before entering the media field. Decades later, after he had already been established, he went and got a masters from Harvard as well. He would count among the 50% if this study counted his company, but O’Reilly didn’t get to where he got to because of Harvard.
Counting grad school too really skews it. Columbia’s J school is not super-hard to get into and is a short-cut to getting into journalism for college grads who do not have any clips and decided post-grad that they wanted to go into the field.
“This is fascinating - and the study used a pretty restrictive definition of “elite school”. Despite this restrictive definition, the over-representation of elite school alumni in these desirable positions is very obvious. It seems like the school you go to matters a lot more than people are willing to admit. I wonder why they separated Business and Law Schools, but not Medical Schools.”
I don’t know how restrictive or honestly how accurate it is to base the universities on average sat score being over a 1400 (or ACT equivalent). The number of colleges included is 53 from US and a bunch outside the US. It would lead you think that MIT and Cal Tech were good for journalism while NYU and UM were not. Also not including graduate schools of journalism, you know like the superb one from Columbia, is a big oversight, imo.
You have to define elite somehow, and there is a correlation between high SATs and elite colleges. They did that and came up with a list of schools, and then figured how well represented they were. Not a hard game, but if your interested in those two schools then I’m sure you can find data on them wrt how well they are represented.
@theloniusmonk: “Also not including graduate schools of journalism, you know like the superb one from Columbia, is a big oversight, imo”
But they do. Here is their methodology:
“To define elite schools, the researchers selected the 29 U.S. universities with the highest median combined SAT Math and Critical Reading scores — this creates a range that designates the top 1 percent of cognitive ability — as well as the top 12 law schools and business schools. Employees who attended one of the 29 universities for graduate school were also counted as going to an elite school. The list includes schools like the California Institute of Technology and Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell. The researchers also considered graduates of the top foreign schools based on the QS World University Rankings, including the top 10 schools in every country.”
Columbia’s J-school would be included as it’s a grad school attached to a uni that is among the 29 schools with the highest undergrad SAT scores.
Let’s not forget that a very high percentage of journalists at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have labored in the vineyards of journalism for many years at other places before landing their current positions at the Times and the Journal. It’s doubtful the college they attended had much to do with their hiring—they got there through proven professional excellence.
A few examples:
Dean Baquet, executive editor of the NY Times, attended Columbia as an undergrad but dropped out to pursue a career in journalism. Was a reporter for his hometown newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, then for the Chicago Tribune where he won a Pulitzer Prize before joining the NY Times.
Frank Bruni, opinion writer for the NY Times, graduated from UNC Chapel Hill where he wrote for the student newspaper, then got a graduate degree from Columbia Journalism School. His first job as a reporter was with the NY Post, followed by several years at the Detroit Free Press where in 1993 he was runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize. Two years later he joined the NY Times.
Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the NY Times, studied at the University of Minnesota but transferred to Brandeis where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies. Got a graduate degree at Oxford then joined the London bureau of United Press International which sent him to Beirut to report on the Lebanese civil war. Two years later the NY Times hired him to cover the Middle East. A year later he won a Pulitzer for international reporting, primarily for his coverage of the massacre of several thousand Palestinians and Labanese Shiites by Lebanese Phalangists…
Michelle Goldberg, opinion columnist, NY Times, BA from SUNY Buffalo, graduate degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. Wrote for Salon.com, The Nation, The American Prospect, Slate, and the Daily Beast and wrote two prize-winning books before joining the NY Times.
Alexander Burns, national political reporter, NY Times, BA Harvard where he was editor of the Harvard Political Review, hired as a researcher-reporter at Politico during its “garage band phase” during the 2008 presidential election, worked his way up to senior political reporter there covering the 2012 presidential race and contributing to the highly regarded “Burns and Haberman” campaign blog. In announcing his hiring in 2015, the Times said they were getting “someone whose byline already carries considerable weight in national political circles.”
Bios like these are endless. These are just smart, talented, hardworking people who rose to the top of their profession before joining the NY Times, which has the luxury of hiring the best journalists in the country. No doubt their college experiences have helped them be better writers and more insightful journalists—but they weren’t hired because they went to fancy schools, but rather because they were among the best in their profession.
Totally. ^^^
Those who are intellectually curious and love to pursue knowledge and solve puzzles–necessary traits for journalists–would also gravitate toward and be good candidates for selective (I hate the word elite) schools. In effect, great students make great journalists. For a print journalist, it’s like writing 200 research papers a year.
Columbia’s graduate school of journalism school is included if I understood correctly. They considered both undergrad and grad programs from Columbia.
There may also be a certain amount of regional bias at play here. The authors of the study looked at only two newspapers, both located in New York City, and 17 of the 28 colleges they defined as “elite” are located in the Northeast. There’s no question that the Times and the Journal are among the best newspapers in the country, along with the Washington Post, also in the Northeast, and journalism jobs there are considered the elite jobs in the profession. But my guess is you’d find the newsrooms of other major Northeastern newspapers, e.g., the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer, similarly heavily populated with alumni of top Northeastern schools, while newspapers in Chicago would have a higher percentage of graduates of the top schools in the Midwest—which would include not only those in the authors’ “elite” pool (Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, WUSTL and Carleton) but also schools like Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. And the top West Coast schools including not only Stanford but also Cal, UCLA, and USC (not in the authors’ “elite” pool) would be disproportionately represented in the newsrooms of California newspapers.
Neither college markets nor labor markets are fully national. Almost all colleges get more applicants from and accept and enroll more students from their home regions—and that’s true all the way up the selectivity scale, including the Ivies. (There are a handful of exceptions like Oberlin, an Ohio school that draws more heavily from the Northeast than from the Midwest). And almost all colleges have more alumni in their home regions than anywhere else. It shouldn’t be surprising that a similar pattern holds in journalism.
Yes I stand corrected on that, thanks to purple and yikes for clarifying. That being said, you now have 82 schools represented in the US, and top 5-7 for each country, seems like a lot of schools.
D2’s BF was just hired as an assistant editor at NY Times. The vetting process was probably harder than IB. I thought it was crazy how many people they interviewed and how long it took. I was even more surprised to find out the pay - close to to first year IB analyst. The BF interviewed at other newspapers and magazines, the pays were a lot lower. Here again, when the compensation is high, it tends to attract more applicants. When there are more applicants than employer could handle, they use schools to weed out applicants for them.
Here are the educational backgrounds of the first 10 reporters/editors/anchors I found (alphabetically) at WBEZ (Chicago’s NPR station):
B.A. in anthropology and comparative religion from Cornell College, Iowa, as well as master’s degrees from The University of Chicago’s Divinity School and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism
B.A. in Journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
B.A. in American Studies from Miami University
Journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School for undergrad (she also studied at MSU later on)
B.A. from Reed College
M.A. in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. in English from Mundelein College
B.A. in International Studies from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa
Columbia College of Chicago (Bachelor’s in journalism)
BS from SUNY Empire State College (late in life)
Finally, while I discovered that Monica Eng is a 4th generation Chicagoan who knew Roger Ebert when she was 6 and her parents and brother went to North Park in Chicago, I couldn’t find out where she herself went to college.
So you made a very valid point, @bclintonk.
Very heavy Midwestern representation (7 of 9 + a 4th generation Chicagoan).
Though I count Reed as an Ivy-equivalent by alumni achievements, by test scores, I’m positive it is not among the top 29, so only 1/9 from the tippy-top (as that study defined it) if you look at only undergrad; 2/9 if you did what the study did and counted grad schools.
WBEZ is not even close to NYT as a major news outlet. Its a radio station. Apples and Oranges.
@CU123, pay for editors is about the same. And NPR is a news organization. Furthermore, if you look at bios, you’d see that NPR tends to pull reporters from newspapers.
OK, so here are the education backgrounds of the editorial board of the Cincinnati Enquirer (which just won the 2018 Pulitzer for best local reporting; they won for their reporting on the impact of the heroin epidemic in the local community):
BA from Columbus St., MS from Troy, MBA from UMD
BA from UCincy
Undergrad at Wittenberg University
Degrees in history and anthropology from Loyola University Chicago and a master’s in community planning from the University of Cincinnati.
Master’s degree in public relations from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Lousiana Tech University (also notes that he was in some HBS exec education program).
So I guess were just going to pull out every local news paper/radio station, don’t think that was what the paper was about.
These are the last individuals who won the Pulitzer for best local reporting:
Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick and Lisa Gartner of Tampa Bay Times
Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci of Daily Breeze, Torrance, CA
Will Hobson and Michael LaForgia of Tampa Bay Times
Brad Schrade, Jeremy Olson and Glenn Howatt of Star Tribune, Minneapolis
LaForgia now works at the NY Times and graduated from USC (the Gamecocks one).
Fitzpatrick: BA from UWashington and went to Columbia’s J-school
Gartner: Northwestern (Medill) for undergrad.
Kuznia: UMinny
Kimitch: Northwestern (BA in Comp Lit)
Can’t find Suraci’s college info. BTW, both Kuznia and Kimitch left journalism (presumably for better-paying jobs).
Hobson now works for WaPo and got a BA in English from BC.
Schrade: BA and MA from UGa (in history and English); now working for the Atlanta J-C.
Olson: St. Thomas (Print Journalism/English)
Howatt: BA from UMinny; MS and MA from UIUC.
So using the study’s methodology, 3/9 from the tippy-top (2/9 if you count only undergrad; both those from NU).
@CU123: Every local paper that wins a Pulitzer Prize. You know, the thing that recognizes excellence in a field (like a Nobel or Academy award).