Master degree journalism online

Sometimes a school's most troublesome competitor is not another school, but no school at all. That's a lesson I learned a few years back teaching in a graduate journalism program. Certainly other schools wanted to recruit some of the same students my school did, but when we studied the prospects who got away, it usually turned out that they hadn't gone to another j-school. They'd taken jobs in the profession.

The process was surprisingly volatile. When jobs were scarce, the pile of applications on my desk was fat, and candidates professed their devotion to expensive professional training. When jobs were plentiful the apps vanished, and everyone suddenly rediscovered experience as the best teacher. Employers, for their part, may have liked what we taught but, when the employees were in short supply, quickly concluded that it wasn't essential.

In short, while I don't think anyone was plugging numbers into a spreadsheet, students and employers alike displayed a sophisticated sense of the competing values of training and experience, opportunity costs, and return on investment. Everyone was agreed that the degree was worth something. The question was how much--compared to what alternative?

I was reminded of my j-school experience as I read some recent figures on demand for college education. As you might expect, at first glance, the need for college grads seems to be rising. As Anthony Carnevale of the Educational Testing Service explained in a talk to the American Youth Policy Forum (summarized online at www.avpf.org/forumbriefs/2001/fb072701.htm), 46 million college-educated baby boomers will retire by 2020, and 12 million new skilled positions will be created, outstripping the estimated supply of new B.A:s by about nine million. There's a widening wage gap between workers possessing a college degree and those lacking one; and a recent Census Department report estimated that over the course of a 40-year career, a college-educated worker will make almost twice as much as a high school grad. And a wage premium indicates scarcity, right?

But consider this. For a report entitled What Jobs Require: Literacy, Education, and Training, 1940-2006, Paul Barton of the Educational Testing Service analyzed the basic skills required by jobs, going back to 1986 and projecting out to 2006. On average, there was no change--the fast-growing high-skill jobs were cancelled by low-skill jobs, which were also growing quickly in number. In addition, Barton cited a study by Daniel Hecker, conducted in the mid 1990s, that found that about a fifth of college graduates were either working at jobs that did not really require a college degree or were unemployed. Why should wages for the college-educated be rising when, apparently at least, there's an oversupply? And why, when there's a premium for finishing college, have graduation rates remained stagnant? It's not easy to say.

Here's a guess: The job market doesn't actually need all those bachelor's degrees. (Our international peers, with substantially lower rates of college participation than ours, manage to supply the needs of their economies.) And when the boomers start retiring and the job market gets tight, some employers will be forced to reduce their educational demands. (How could they not? Is higher ed really going to produce an extra nine million B.A's between now and 2020?) They'll hire less-educated candidates--the way the dot-coms hired degreeless computer geeks a few years ago, when they'd drained the tech labor pool. The employers will make it work, because they won't be able to afford not to.

This won't be the end of the world for colleges and universities. They may give out fewer bachelor's degrees as students find they can choose jobs over education, but they'll make up the enrollments in certificate programs and advanced degrees. (If the British Open University can structure a master's for students who haven't finished their B.A.'s, so can you.)

But there will be change. The long reign of the bachelor's degree as the employment credential of choice has helped let universities get away with runaway costs; it has certainly papered over troubling differences in quality of institutions and the educations they provide. A change in the economic value of a bachelor's degree would mark the end of a way of thinking about higher education that has prevailed for more than 30 years.

That's not a bad thing, of course. And it's not a bad thing that we may be on the verge of an era in which the value of an education has to be stated in terms of something other than lifetime wage projections. We know education is better than nothing. It's only fair that from time to time we should have to prove it.

Patrick Clinton can be reached at pclinton@universitybusiness.com.