J-School Grads Are Getting Jobs .... Yours!

AOL's Daily Finance reports that, despite the miserable financial state of the media, enrollment in journalism schools is on the rise and, perhaps not unrelatedly, j-grads are actually finding jobs -- in journalism!

Columbia University and CUNY's graduate schools of journalism report that more than 60 percent of their recent alum have found employment related to their degrees -- many at those same institutions that are vigorously laying off veteran staffers.

And therein may lie the explanation:

My guess is at least some of it is a direct result of the massive staff cutbacks just about every media organization has enacted in the past couple years. It's a corporate cliche to lay people off and euphemize it as "restructuring," but you can be sure that some of the companies that are letting go well-paid editors and writers in their 40s and 50s are quietly stocking up on fresh j-school grads whose lack of real-word experience is at least partly made up for by their effortless fluency in the ways of the web -- and their willingness to work for $35,000 a year.