Too many students, not enough jobs?: a comparative study of Australian journalism programs

By the late 1990's, Australia had become one of the largest providers of academic journalism education in the world. More than half of Australia's universities offered courses in journalism practice and studies. This educational phenomenon occurred largely in the late 1980's and through the 1990's as university administrators searched assiduously for new growth areas to offset dwindling numbers in traditional areas of academic study. In early 1997, 22 of Australia's 37 univesities offered vocationally-oriented journalism courses, and more were projected. In conjunction with the rapid growth of communications courses in the years following World War 11, and the surge of interest in cultural studies from the early 1990's, journalism represented a booming sub-sector in an educational market where many traditional areas were losing student appeal. This thesis does not try to account for the journalism phenomenon in Australian tertiary education, or to predict its future in any detail.