The math doesn't obviously add up: television newsrooms are shrinking, public radio is leaning harder on syndicated programming, and yet more students than ever want to enroll in Kincaid University's journalism school.
Applications to Kincaid University’s School of Communications have climbed for a third straight cycle, reaching 640 for next fall’s incoming class, up from 540 three years ago, according to figures Dean Priya Sundaram presented to the university’s faculty senate Tuesday.
The increase comes even as the local and national news industry keeps shedding jobs, a contradiction Sundaram said she has learned not to be surprised by anymore. “Every year someone asks me if this is the year the numbers finally drop,” she said. “Every year I tell them the same thing: young people are not naive about the job market. They’re choosing this anyway.”
A shrinking industry, a growing applicant pool
WBHA, the city’s NBC affiliate and the only Bellwater television station with a substantial news operation, cut six positions from its newsroom last year after Vantage Media Holdings, its parent company, ordered budget reductions across its regional stations. WBOH, the public radio station broadcasting from the Bellwater State campus, has leaned more heavily on syndicated NPR programming as its own locally produced reporting has thinned.
Against that backdrop, Sundaram said prospective students are less focused on landing a traditional reporting job at a legacy outlet and more drawn to the program’s expanding coursework in data analysis, audience engagement and multi-platform storytelling. “The students who are applying now have often already run a newsletter or a podcast in high school,” she said. “They’re not waiting for permission to practice journalism. They want us to help them do it better and figure out how to get paid for it.”
Jordan Aldrich, a junior in the program from Cedar Hollow, said the appeal wasn’t naive optimism about the industry but a belief that local reporting still mattered even if the business model was unsettled. “I watched the Times cover the transit vote and the overdose numbers and realized nobody else was going to do that reporting if people like me didn’t go do it,” Aldrich said. “That felt more important to me than whether the pay was going to be great right away.”
Faculty debate what to teach next
The applications bump has not resolved an internal debate among the school’s faculty over how much of the curriculum should shift toward the skills that get graduates hired outside traditional newsrooms, including corporate communications and grant-funded nonprofit newsroom work. Sundaram said she has convened a curriculum committee to revisit required courses for the first time in nearly a decade, with a report expected before the spring semester.
Some faculty members have pushed to preserve the program’s traditional emphasis on daily reporting fundamentals, arguing that a rush toward newer formats risks producing graduates who can build an audience but can’t verify a fact or navigate a public-records request. Sundaram said she sees the tension as healthy rather than something to resolve definitively in either direction.
We’re not going to become a marketing school wearing a journalism school’s name, but we also can’t pretend the only successful outcome for our graduates is a staff job at a paper the size of the one that used to hire forty reporters a year. That paper doesn’t exist anymore, here or almost anywhere else.
Dr. Priya Sundaram, Dean, Kincaid School of Communications
Sundaram said she plans to convene a public panel next month examining the future of local news in Bellwater, drawing on faculty, alumni now working in nontraditional roles, and staff from the Times and WBHA. She said the goal is partly to inform the curriculum review and partly to give the broader community a chance to weigh in on what kind of journalism training the city needs.
The applications increase has also caught the attention of Kincaid President Howard Faircloth, who has cited the school of communications as one of several priority areas in a capital campaign now taking shape. Sundaram said she has asked for additional scholarship funding and a renovated newsroom lab as part of that campaign, betting that sustained applicant interest will make the case for continued investment even as other departments across the country cut journalism programs rather than expand them.
For now, Sundaram said the school is simply trying to keep pace with demand. Class sizes in the school’s introductory reporting course have grown by nearly a third over the past three years without a corresponding increase in faculty, and Sundaram said hiring at least one additional instructor is now her top budget request heading into next year’s planning cycle.
The trend at Kincaid mirrors a pattern Sundaram said she has heard described at journalism education conferences around the country: enrollment holding up or even growing at university programs even as the professional job market contracts around them. She said she has stopped trying to reconcile the two trends and instead treats the applicant surge as an opportunity to reshape what a journalism degree actually prepares students for, rather than a signal that the traditional career path is quietly recovering.
Not all of the growth has come from students planning traditional reporting careers. Sundaram said roughly a third of this year’s applicants indicated interest in nonprofit communications, corporate storytelling or documentary work rather than daily news reporting, a shift she said the curriculum committee is taking seriously as it revisits required coursework. She said the school has no plans to drop its core reporting requirements but is exploring new elective tracks to serve those students without diluting the program’s reporting-focused reputation.
Aldrich, the Cedar Hollow junior, said he has already started applying for internships at the Times and at WBHA, aware that neither outlet is hiring the way it once did. “I know I might end up somewhere that doesn’t exist yet, some kind of outlet or newsletter nobody has built,” he said. “But I’d rather learn how to do this work well and figure out where it leads than skip journalism school because the old jobs are disappearing.”