Columbia Journalism School Grads?

12k when I was there. 50k now! Dang. That diploma on the wall might the most valuable asset I have in the house.

 

As someone who once strongly considered Columbia, I feel like it depends on what you want to do. If you're happy covering local sports or politics or cops, etc., probably not. But if you want to work for the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post and win Pulitzer prices and Polk awards and investigate BP, national office seekers, etc., or set yourself apart when applying for some of the big boy sports jobs at big boy publications, then it's worth considering. Not just for the "credential" or the networking, although those aren't small matters, but for the intensive education you would get. Yes, there's no substitute for experience, but I don't think good J-school graduate programs are just a bunch of ivory tower classroom learning. Look at the roster of faculty members they have at places like Columbia, NYU, Berkeley, and Northwestern. It's my understanding that they're sending you out in the field to do real reporting, then tearing it apart top to bottom like the best editor you'll ever have.

McNulty, I think that I would disagree with you about taking the cheaper MBA (or JD or MBA or MA) over the more expensive one. It's my suspicion in education that you get what you pay for.

 

Hey Dick (great name, BTW),

"It's my suspicion in education that you get what you pay for"

If that was the case then all the grads who walked from expensive schools would be living cake lives right now. Face facts, especially in law, grad school bubbles are gonna burst. Why pay near $100k OUT OF YOUR OWN POCKET (which many people, especially on the east coast, aren't doing) for a job making $100k working 80 hours a week? I don't dog education. I'm just not going to add on a frivolous grad school debt to not make enough money to live decently. Friend of mine is thinking about dropping $75k on a law degree from some mid-tier school in Michigan. I'm trying my hardest to wave the red flag.

Life is all about who you know. Bust your ass and network hard and make connections, that will make your MBA from UDC go a lot further and be more cost-efficient than just paying out the ass to go to GW (which is a school I like) "because it's better." BULLSHIT.

 

Sorry, but you are an idiot. In education, you get what you make of it.

Sin,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html?pagewanted=all

 

That story broke my heart. Not surprisingly, she's just another young adult around my age who's amassed an astronomical debt. My debts weren't of the student loan variety, I just went credit card crazy -- paying for text books and community expenses -- and found myself more than $12K in the hole. I'm about $600 from being debt free after four years of shutting down my spending and making more money.

My ex-girlfriend did Penn State and University of Illinois to get her speech pathology degree, walked away with more than $50,000 in loans, only to land a job paying around $52,000/yr. It would kill her to know I'm earning a substantial amount more at my 9-to-5, and that doesn't include my freelance wages. And that's with an Associate's Degree and approximately 20 credits remaining for my B.A. in journalism.

In short, fuck school.

 

This. High-school kids are being pushed into college as a way for the colleges to soak up a lot of money, with absolutely no regard or planning about whether they get any benefit out of it.

 

The story doesn't break my heart. It's one thing to have dreams. It's another thing to act stupid. It never dawned on her, or her mom, that getting $60K in debt was a bad thing. Helllo?

When I was looking at colleges, the only ones I looked at were state schools, even though my parents told me to look at whatever schools I wanted because they wanted me happy. I knew they didn't make much money (my dad moaning over the utility bill every other month gave me a good clue), and I sure as heck didn't want them killing themselves financially.

As is, my mom, bless her heart, worked one overnight shift a week caring for an old lady in her home, which included some physically unpleasant tasks. This in addition to a full time job.

I ended up having one student loan, totaling about $3K. It got paid off in five years, and I had a great experience at my state school.

So, I wouldn't say fuck school. I'd say, fuck the schools that charge four times the amount for an education that many college kids could get at a much cheaper place.

 

I can't speak for her, but I can speak for me. I'm the son of poor people, who themselves are the son and daughter of poor people. The only thing my dad knew about finances was how to float a check to make sure the cable bill was paid.

All they ever told me was that going to college was the most important thing, nothing else mattered. You could make it all up after college if you had to borrow money to do it.

Was that smart financial planning? Hell no. But if my mom doesn't know crap about financial planning, and my dad doesn't know crap about financial planning, where the heck is 18-year-old me supposed to learn it from?

Thankfully they did talk me into going to a cheap school, and they taught me enough work ethic that I didn't borrow for all of it.

 

Do people who borrow for tuition not work as hard as those who don't? That seems like a false dichotomy.

And, without more information, I don't necessarily disagree with McNulty's argument. Maybe people from Harvard, etc., don't succeed because they went to Harvard. Maybe they succeed because they are the kind of people who would have succeeded anyway with an associate's degree or no degree at all, and schools like Harvard or Princeton (or, for the purposes of this discussion, Columbia) simply attract (snow?) a self-selecting student body. This is not my intuition - I'm guessing the truth lies somewhere in the middle - but it is certainly possible, and for me to argue vehemently otherwise without anything to back it up would be just pulling it out of you-know-where.

But back to your point RickStain: I don't understand the implication that people who borrow money for an expensive school like Columbia or GW don't work as hard as people who don't borrow. What makes you think that?

 

I thought about starting a thread about that Times article when it came out. The higher education bubble is ripe to burst.

It's one thing to go to college if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.

But if you want to work for/as a photographer, why are you going to NYU, getting in a ton of debt, and majoring in women's & religious studies?

How did you expect to pay of your bills with that degree?

Too many people want to have a cool, fun job. That's fine, but those jobs don't always pay well since so many people want them, and you shouldn't put yourself in a boat load of debt if they're the ones you want to pursue.

 

It's not about what school you go to. It's simply that working and going to school will always be harder than just going to school, all other things being equal.

 

OK, now I follow you. I didn't catch onto the part about working to keep down the borrowing - I thought you were just exclusively talking about low-tuition vs. high-tuition schools, and I didn't think it was fair to say, for example, that a Stanford student somehow works less hard than a Juco student. But that's not what you meant.

That being said, my children aren't going to work during the school year in high school or college if I can help it (and maybe that's a pipedream in these economic times). School can be their job.