by Adam McDowell
Dylan Robertson counts himself among the lucky ones. The 21-year-old is a fourth-year student of a joint Centennial College-University of Toronto journalism program. He has a part-time job at the Toronto Star gathering raw information from the squawking of the police scanner and other devices of the radio room. And in the summer, he hopes to return to The Gazette in Montreal as a reporter*.
“It’s fun graduating into such a stable job market,” he says at the Toronto college’s mockup newsroom, displaying a plucky sarcasm that will serve him well in the industry.
If he can crack into it, that is. Like most journalism school grads, Robertson faces “grim” job prospects. He says even some of his instructors have been refreshingly honest about the difficulties faced by the journalism class of ’12.
“One of them said, ‘If I was in your shoes, I don’t know if I’d be going into this.’ That’s a warm feeling,” he says.
At least anecdotally speaking, the news media in Canada have created relatively few jobs in recent years as their power has been eroded by falling advertising revenue. So when there are fewer opportunities for their graduates, why are journalism schools across the country staying the same size and even proliferating? Why are students still clamouring to apply?
“It's a topic that's of great discussion within the journalism teaching world … Are you training people for an obsolete job?” says Peter Klein, acting director of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. “My father used to build carburetors at the assembly line at Ford. I wouldn’t start a school teaching people how to build carburetors because now there are fuel-injection cars.”
Which is not to say he believes journalism has reached the same state.
“Yes, some journalism schools should shrink their enrolments and I think those are schools that do not teach…real-world skills,” says Joe Banks, coordinator of the journalism program at Ottawa’s Algonquin College and director of GoJournalism*. But conversely, those schools that perform especially well at preparing new journalists should grow, he says.
And they have been growing. Two new journalism programs* are in the works, at the University of Toronto and at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford, Ont., campus.
Between college, undergraduate and graduate programs, Ontario is home to 23 of the 43 schools training new journalists in Canada (including the planned programs). According to the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, enrollment in journalism school directly from high school has held roughly steady over the past four years—from 417 students in 2008 to 427 in 2011.
Fifteen of Ontario’s programs are at its community colleges, which have traditionally worked as springboards for many students to get jobs at small-market and community media outlets. Nowadays, graduates of many of these programs face dimmer prospects than the average for their colleges. In Ontario, graduates of community colleges are surveyed on their employment situation six months after they finish school. Figures show that journalism grads are often less likely to be employed than the average for their college, and far less likely to be employed in their chosen field.
At Durham College, for example, 43 percent of 2010’s print journalism graduates had jobs in their field and 71 percent were working six months after graduation. As for grads of the print and broadcast program, the figures were 27 percent employed in a related field and 80 percent employed overall. Meanwhile, 50 percent of all Durham grads were employed in their chosen fields and 83 percent of them had jobs. The journalism graduates were faring worse than the average, and based on the reports from other Ontario colleges, Durham's results are typical.
In Ontario, journalism schools are not asked or expected by the province to match their enrolment figures to the wider employment picture. In an email, Tanya Blazina, a spokesperson for Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, writes that program spaces are created in response to student demand: “Our ministry provides funding to post-secondary institutions for the training that students request. We don't limit a student’s educational pursuits based on what market employment predictions are (in any sector). We can't speculate on why students are interested in certain courses. Perhaps students are just interested in certain courses for professional or personal development—or for careers abroad.”
Once students are enrolled, instructors generally won’t try to scare them away from journalism. “No school in Ontario or Canada will voluntarily do that, based on how post-secondary funding works,” Banks says. More students equals more provincial funding, and “cutting really goes against an inflexible formula.”
In other words, students themselves must investigate their post-graduation employment prospects. No one else will do it for them.
“The good ones get work, and the lucky ones,” says Ellin Bessner, an instructor at Centennial College. And those who are less lucky, Bessner says, now benefit from a curriculum that teaches entrepreneurialism and survival in the freelance world.*
Banks says not only do entry-level jobs still come up; he promises he can find a newspaper job for any Algonquin graduate willing to move to a small town, get a driver’s licence and work for low pay.
UBC is undertaking its first graduate employment survey this spring. While the hard data won’t be available for months, the acting director of the program says its recent graduates have done well, landing jobs at Global Television and Al-Jazeera, for example.
“I haven't seen a dramatic change in students' ability to find jobs,” Klein says. That may have something to do with the quality of the applicants at UBC’s master’s program: The university accepts 30 students a year out of 180 applicants, and many of those enrolled already hold other advanced degrees.
When Eric Lam enrolled in Ryerson University’s undergraduate journalism program from high school in 2005, he says he had “zero” idea about the employment picture for the field. He's now 25 and a reporter for the Financial Post section of the National Post.
He was fortunate to be hired by a major daily newspaper immediately after university, but many—if not most—of his classmates have failed to find steady work in the business.
“But I think that's true of any program,” Lam says. “I know people who have finished their aerospace engineering degrees and can't find a job either.”
* CORRECTION FEBRUARY 6: An earlier version of this story stated that Dylan Robertson hoped to return to The Gazette to work as a copy editor, and referred to the University of Toronto's new journalism program as an MA program and referred to Joe Banks as the director of the journalism program at Algonquin College.. A quote attributed to Ellin Bessner has also been added post-publication; its omission was an editing error. OpenFile regrets the oversight.
