A journalism degree is not useless

Virginia Calcagni, Staff Writer:
What do you want to be when you grow up? One of the most frequently asked questions in elementary school, and quite frankly, for the rest of your life, it is a question you will ask yourself.
Astronaut, rock star, doctor, something completely extravagant is usually the answer when you are younger, and as you grow up it becomes a lot harder to decide exactly what you want to be when you grow up.
I am a journalism major, and I love it. I have never doubted my degree focus for the four years that I have been at Southern.
So when I read a blog posted by media bistro.com based off of a list created by the Daily Beast (an opinion site), after seeing it on one of my Facebook friends posts, I was not happy about it to say the least.
Journalism is listed as the number one of the 20 most useless degrees you can get. Horticulture and agriculture are close behind, but quite frankly, when you look through this list, it is surprising; it also includes advertising, fashion design, music, chemistry, nutrition and art history to name a few.
To say, “hey you would be better off going into a degree in horticulture,” is pretty sad. Journalism is an important field. Being able report, interview and describe events is just as valuable as saving plants.
To surprise readers even more, photography, theater and the arts are near the bottom of the list. This surprised me because I thought there were less jobs available in the fields.
How can you call a degree useless? These are 20 major college degrees, degrees that a lot of people strive for. I mean to begin with, doesn’t it mean something that we go to school for four plus years working towards a degree in something that we find interest in?
I mean no one said it was easy, or that you would make much money doing it (median starting salary being around $35,000) and about 4,400 changing jobs according to Media Bistro. But if you enjoy the job, what is the problem? Now, besides the fact that journalists don’t exactly make the best money in the world (and really, what professions besides businessmen, doctors, nurses, and lawyers, to name a few do?)
There is also the issue of bloggers. There are a number of people who blog mostly their opinions and they don’t have to be journalists to do it. Being as it is that the internet is a form of absolutely everything these days blogging is huge and easy. You can pose as a journalist and still be considered one.
There are good and bad people doing every single job out there. But it is like a double standard with journalists, it seems to be the number one profession that people complain about and apparently it is useless. Yes, let’s dump the journalism degrees and let the bloggers who are business professionals or something report on the presidential election. That doesn’t make sense. But money is everything these days and my guess is that seeing this report is not going to make people choose the journalism field as their primary degree, which to me is sad.