Is a Journalism degree really worth it?

The following quote that we discussed in class today touched upon something I realized about a month into my freshman year at IC.

"The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter."

This is exactly why I realized that I needed to be a double major at IC (I declared my politics major sophomore year). I remember calling my parents during my Intro to Journalism class especially, complaining that any idiot could learn how to use an AP Style Book. It's unfortunate, but it's true. I didn't see much value in spending $45,000 a year to have a professor show me how to look up when to abbreviate words and when to write them out in their entirety. So many of my Park classes since then have done the same exact thing. Last semester in News Editing we had AP Style quizzes just like we did in Intro to Journalism, News Reporting and Writing 1 and News 2. It's become increasingly frustrating and, in my opinion, an insult to our intelligence as students. I think that journalism programs (or at least this one, since this is the only one I've ever been involved in) make journalism so mechanic that it makes it easy to lose your passion for it.

I think that for undergraduate journalism programs to remain relevant, they need to require their students to pick up a second major so that they're "experts" on something else. I know that Park makes all of its majors have a non-communications minor, so they're taking a step in the right direction. However, more needs to be done because anyone can write, it just matters what you write about and how you do it.