@Gator88NE I’m not at all feeding into what the admissions office is saying at face value. It’s well-known that CS1950 had something to do with this drop. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s 100% that. Applications have been up, but this year’s freshman class was smaller than last year’s ( 6,191 vs. 2014 fall semester 6,515 students). So a decline in fall 2016’s freshman class would make sense, albeit not such a big one. They’ve said that there’s competition between peer institutions; other schools (like Alabama) offer better financial aid packages, so people choose elsewhere (which also makes sense). But again, I’m not trying to say the events of the fall had no impact. Just that I don’t think all 1,500 fewer students are contributing to the decline.
Also, whoa whoa, @cobale. The j-school’s reputation is fully intact; anyone who thinks the j-school had anything to do with the Click incident is 100% wrong. Click worked for the Communication Department in the College of Arts and Science. Not journalism. She had a courtesy appointment with the j-school (as they require some non-journalism faculty to sit on some board, or something to that effect), and I believe the day or two after the infamous Click incident, they dropped her appointment. The j-school has been very clear that they care about freedom of speech and denounced Click’s actions. There’s honestly no better time to be a journalism student at Mizzou — the amount of real experience my peers and I have gotten reporting on this national issue is second to none. As much criticism as I’ve heard about Mizzou, none of it has been about the School of Journalism.
There’s a lot of misinformation out there. Yeah, people have their opinions about what was right vs. wrong, but there’s also a lot of misinformation about all of this that people who aren’t on campus don’t see. Not trying to get on a high horse and tell people they’re wrong, just saying that people act like Mizzou is a terrible place to send their children (either out of fear of racism or fear of bad administration), but that’s not true. Maybe for some majors where other schools have better programs, but I can say at least for journalism I recommend the j-school just as much as I did before last semester happened.