On Defining the Nature of Graduate Education

Abstract

A panel on administering graduate programs at the 1993 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention brought together about 20 directors of graduate programs.(1) The purpose of the panel was to examine issues relevant to professionally oriented M.A. programs. What became clear as the discussion progressed was that the directors knew little about graduate programs at other universities but were eager to know more about them. It also was clear that the directors shared many of the same concerns about the state of graduate education. With more than 10,000 students enrolled in more than 160 graduate programs(2) in journalism and mass communication, graduate education has been ignored for too long.Much of the discussion at the AETMC panel focused on curriculum and on the difficulty graduate programs in journalism and mass communication have competing for scarce resources within the academy. In this essay, I address both of these issues as they pertain to professional M.A. and Ph.D. programs. My purpose is not to provide a blueprint for curriculum or to provide a detailed strategy to compete for resources. Rather, it is to suggest ways of dealing with these issues so as to improve the status of our graduate programs. At the heart of my argument is the need to better integrate our graduate programs into the academy and to better prepare our students for their chosen careers. Above all, we need to make our programs central to the educational mission of universities.PROFESSIONAL M.A. PROGRAMSAny program that offers professional training, be it business, law or journalism, is a magnet for criticism.(3) This criticism comes from both inside and outside the academy. From within the academy, professional programs are often considered second-class citizens because they are thought to teach nothing but technical skills and their professors are thought to be practitioners and not scholars.(4) From outside the academy, the professions criticize these programs for not keeping with their needs. Often, this criticism is aimed at professors who are considered to be hopelessly out of touch with the real and who are more interested in conducting arcane research than in teaching students practical skills.The very nature of professional education engenders this type of criticism because it is caught between the demands of the academic world and those of the professional world. There is a need for those of us involved with professional education, especially at the graduate level, to develop strategies for dealing with what appears to be the irreconcilable demands of these two worlds. In short, we need to take the offensive: We should not have to apologize to our colleagues in other disciplines for offering professional training at the graduate level and we should not have to beg the profession's forgiveness for teaching theory.Our first challenge is to educate the university about graduate education in journalism and mass communication. Simply put, our programs are not well understood by our colleagues in other departments, by deans of graduate colleges and by members of the central administration. The consequences of this are dire in times of budget cutbacks and reallocation of resources.One problem is that our students often don't measure up when compared with graduate students in more traditional disciplines. Our students' undergraduate grade point averages and combined scores on the Graduate Record Exam often don't compare favorably with those of typical students in graduate school. But students enrolled in graduate programs in journalism and mass communication are not typical of students enrolled in other graduate programs in the university. Unlike most disciplines where graduate students have recently received their bachelor's degree, graduate students in journalism and mass communication tend to be older students who are returning to school. At Iowa, for example, the average age of students entering the M. …