If the cost of higher education already seemed absurd, Columbia University’s School of Journalism has set a new bar. The school is offering a new, one-year master of science in data journalism with a price tag of $147,514. This includes tuition, fees, and living expenses.
Even though the median annual salary of journalists is less than $38,000, and job opportunities are expected to drop eight percent over the next decade, the school believes the demand for data literacy at news organizations justifies the degree’s inflated price.
“You would be a highly literate candidate to participate in the modern newsroom, where you have technologists working alongside journalists to create new engagement with the audience in the digital age,” said Steve Coll, the Dean of Columbia’s graduate journalism program. “So the idea is, you could take these skills and be a world-beating investigative reporter in this era of big data, or you could equally apply your journalism vision to the newsroom of the future.”
This might be true, but how long will it be before any journalism graduate earns enough money to even make a dent in $147,000 worth of debt? How long will it take to even make up for the cost of their bachelor’s degree?
The director of the data journalism program, Giannina Segnini, went so far as to use the Trump administration to highlight the demand for such a degree. They made no secret of the school’s progressive, anti-Trump bias.
“Journalists are facing the challenge of covering one of the most unusual and unreliable governments in modern history: President Trump disseminates lies, twisted facts, and changes in policy in real time through his Twitter account,” Segnini argues. “Despite—or perhaps because of—all of this, investigative journalism is flourishing.”
The academics at Columbia University appear to live in a bubble with no conception of what it means to be a journalist in today’s job market. While their concept of investigative journalism might be “flourishing,” that doesn’t mean the salaries of journalists are doing the same.
Of course, Columbia might just be capitalizing on generous, graduate student loan forgiveness programs that allow borrowers to repay their debt as a share of their income, putting most of the burden on taxpayers. Preston Cooper at Forbes points out that while a journalism grad could potentially only be responsible for around $83,000 of this kind of debt, taxpayers would have to foot the bill for the remaining balance of around $178,000.
Until students and parents realize what rip-off programs like these are, universities will continue to lead their graduates into unmanageable debt with nothing but a piece of paper to show for it.
