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The New York Times article caught my eye. JOURNALISM SCHOOLS ARE STILL BOOMING, said the headline. That’s nice, I thought. As a college senior considering J-school, I was interested. I kept reading and learned that “the newspaper industry cut more than 2,000 jobs last year as it continued to lose readers and advertisers to the Internet.” That’s . . . less nice. The worry set in. If supply is high and demand is low, what happens to all those J-school graduates?

They’re starving and unemployed, said the skeptic in me.

The optimist in me replied, It’s not that there are no jobs — there are new jobs.

Like what?

I don’t know.

The skeptic wanted to know.

A few days later the skeptic was on the phone. Having narrowed the search to master’s programs in journalism, I had scoured a dozen schools’ Web sites for evidence of what becomes of their graduates. Information was scarce.

“Do you track your graduates?” I asked. The answer was yes. But when I asked if I could see the data, the answer was no. “Why not?” I pressed.

Tracking is difficult, I was told, and there is currently very little data. What has been gathered is mostly anecdotal, and anyway it’s confidential.

“About a hundred percent of our students are employed after six months,” said Sengsavanh Phousavanh, assistant director of career services at the University of Missouri journalism school. “We’ve got great numbers,” she said. “It’s just hard for us to get graduates to report it.”

The skeptic noted that newly minted reporters were too busy (or too something) to report, and J-school authorities were withholding information.

But wait, the optimist said, it’s not that J-schools are doing something bad, they’re just missing an opportunity to do something useful. Other professional schools — business, law, engineering, medicine — have figured out the importance of keeping detailed information on their graduates, and track it diligently. Their Web sites commonly offer voluminous reports going back five or ten years. Business schools even have a national organization to standardize data, the MBA Career Services Council.

J-schools, though, have never gotten their act together on the problem. U.S. News & World Report stopped ranking journalism graduate schools in the mid-1990s when the schools complained that the rankings — which in the absence of statistics were based entirely on peer review — weren’t credible.

Actually, there is some good data, but it’s centralized, and you have to know where to look. Several journalism schools, while not providing their own data, did point me to an important resource, the Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduates conducted by Lee Becker at the University of Georgia’s Cox Center. Founded in 1964, this national study samples nearly ninety journalism programs.

Some of the findings are encouraging. The most recent study, released in August, shows that unemployment has decreased for the second year in a row, with jobs in online media growing especially fast. Three in ten graduates are writing and editing for the Web, up from two in ten a year ago. Unfortunately, since students are queried just six months after graduation, the study leaves key career-path issues unilluminated. Also, the study tracks only undergraduates. Still, it is a unique resource, offering a long view (over decades) and a broad view (across the nation).

Then at the University of Texas the dogged optimist found a new study that surveys graduates five years out. “It just came off the photocopier,” said Matt Berndt, director of career services. The study found, among other things, that graduates were highly mobile. Fifty-seven percent had contracts for two years or less. But despite the lack of stability, job satisfaction was high, with 86 percent of graduates reporting that they were either very or somewhat satisfied with their job.

Meanwhile I discovered that two other universities — the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia — have just conducted five-year-out studies but have not yet processed the data. And I learned that the University of Southern California has a new full-time employee whose job is to track graduates.

Evidently the idea of gathering data from graduates, systematically and over time, is gaining traction.

Collecting this data would be a major undertaking for schools (even Berndt’s study, though the sample size was large, had a response rate of only 18.5 percent), but it could have many potential benefits and beneficiaries. Students would have a barometer for the job market, and schools could measure the efficacy of the education they provide and adjust their curriculums accordingly.

So we should all encourage journalism schools to gather such information and make it available. Recent graduates are the probes sent out into the perhaps hostile, perhaps fertile, new universe of media. They have valuable information, not just about where their paychecks are coming from, but about what was most useful in their coursework, and what new skills they are acquiring on the job. Schools need to make clear to students that they have a responsibility to send data back to the mother ship, and maybe provide an incentive for them to do so. And ideally, schools could adopt standards and share techniques.

Reviewing her notes at the end of the day, the skeptic couldn’t help but chuckle. Many were strikingly similar. “We’re preparing to send out a survey,” said one. “We’re about to do a survey,” said another. Said a third, “We’re in the process of revamping.” And a fourth, “We are in the process of trying to revamp . . . .”

The optimist was pleased.

To read the articles in the September/October 2006 issue, click here.

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