Hi. I’m currently a senior in highschool, well into my college search. I am hoping to major in English/communications, or more ideally journalism. I want a small ish (5,000 students or less) school on the east coast/ new england. On my list is Emerson college, Clark university, Massachusetts College of Liberal arts, and Vassar college. I think they are all good options, but I wanted to know if there may be more out there for me before I make such a huge decision. I get good grades, and have several extracurriculars, and ok SAT score. Any info/ideas anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated.
Vassar is an outlier in the list you provided. It is way more competitive than the other three.
I’ve given this advice many times before on this board: If you want to be a journalist, the number-one most important criterion in choosing a college is the student newspaper, not the availability of the major. Pick a school that has a DAILY newspaper that is 100% student run without a faculty adviser and that is not part of a course or major. Ideally, the paper should be covering news outside the university in addition to university news. It should be an Associated Press subscriber. The paper should be completely independently run. Some such student papers are partially funded by the university, and some are completely financially independent.
Here are two sources that rank the top college newspapers. Note that not all the papers on this list meet the criteria I listed above. You’ll have to sort through them.
http://www.collegemediamatters.com/2015/08/03/best-college-newspapers-2015-ranking-released-by-princeton-review/
http://www.collegechoice.net/top-50-college-newspapers/
Bottom line is that if you want to go into journalism, major in whatever you want. Just make sure you walk into the newspaper office on day one and get heavily involved.
Thank you so much! @brantly Vassar is definitly a bit of a reach, but its a great school so the prestige, while intimidating, isn’t going to stop me from applying. Wherever I attend I plan on being part of the newspaper. I toured MCLA today, and l loved it. I asked for a copy of their newspaper “the beacon”, and it seems to have a good mix of both school, and local events and stories.
I’m sure MCLA is a great college, but if you are serious about going into journalism it will not be easy to break into the field from MCLA. I looked at the school’s paper and first things I noticed are 1) it is a weekly, and 2) it has faculty advisers. It’s best to have experience on a daily newspaper. And any campus newspaper that has faculty advisers 1) is censored, and 2) is not nearly the same type of experience as a 100% student-run newspaper. It just depends on how serious you are about journalism. If you are looking to work on a hyper-local paper, I’m sure MCLA would be good training for that. If you are seeking a major-market or even national publication, it will be very, very hard to break in unless you are an alum of a college newspaper that has a lot of its alum working in the industry.
Another thing I noticed: GLARING mistake in the headline and premise of the current lead article of The Beacon. Headline is, “FAFSA deadline now October 1.” The article lede says, “The federal department of education has changed the FAFSA annual due date to Oct. 1, as opposed to the usual date of March 1.” http://www.theonlinebeacon.com/
This is completely false. FAFSA is now available on October 1, but certainly that is not the deadline.
@brantly any thoughts on Clark university? I just got back from my tour there and it seems like a cool place. I snagged a copy of their newspaper, “the scarlet”
Muhlenberg has a good communications program as do GW and Hopkins though they don’t meet your size/geo criteria.
Don’t discount the liberal arts colleges. While they won’t have a communications major, some have very strong English departments. A few that come to mind are Hamilton, College of the Holy Cross and Wellesley
You don’t need a communications major if you are serious about being a journalist. You need a student newspaper that meets as many of the the criteria as possible. @jnicole55 You need to research the Clarke student newspaper. The most important part about being a reporter is discovering facts and being excited to discover facts. You can’t ask someone to do it for you. Why don’t t you research it and come back and tell me what you discover?
@brantly from what I can tell the paper is completely student run. They focus on school events and stories, but also local news, and opinions on national issues.