Columbia School Of Journalism Acceptance Rate (2023)

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the universitys Morningside Heights campus in New York City.

Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism schools in the world and the only journalism school in the Ivy League. It offers four graduate degree programs.

The school shares facilities with the Pulitzer Prizes. It directly administers several other prizes, including the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, honoring excellence in broadcast and digital journalism in the public service. It co-sponsors the National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, and publishes the Columbia Journalism Review.

In addition to offering professional development programs, fellowships and workshops, the school is home to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism,[2] the Brown Institute for Media Innovation,[3] and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.[4]

Admission to the school is highly selective and has traditionally drawn a very international student body. A Board of Visitors meets periodically to advise the deans office and support the schools initiatives.[5]

columbia school of journalism acceptance rate

Columbia University admissions is most selective with an acceptance rate of 6%. Half the applicants admitted to Columbia University have an SAT score between 1470 and 1570 or an ACT score of 33 and 35.

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Columbia University is ranked #2 in National Universities. Schools are ranked according to their performance across a set of widely accepted indicators of excellence.

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Columbia University School of Journalism Overview

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university’s Morningside Heights campus in New York City.

In addition to offering professional development programs, fellowships and workshops, the school is home to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Admission to the school is highly selective and has traditionally drawn a very international student body. A Board of Visitors meets periodically to advise the dean’s office and support the school’s initiatives

History[edit]

In 1892, Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-born newspaper magnate, offered Columbia University President Seth Low funding to establish the worlds first school of journalism. He sought to elevate a profession viewed more often as a common trade learned through an apprenticeship. His idea was for a center of enlightened journalism in pursuit of knowledge as well as skills in the service of democracy. “It will impart knowledge—not for its own sake, but to be used for the public service,” Pulitzer wrote in a now landmark, lead essay of the May 1904 issue of the North American Review.[6] The university was resistant to the idea. But Lows successor, Nicholas Murray Butler, was more receptive to the plan.[7]

Pulitzer was set on creating his vision at Columbia and offered it a $2 million gift, one-quarter of which was to be used to establish prizes in journalism and the arts. It took years of negotiations and Pulitzers death in October 1911 to finalize plans. On September 30, 1912, classes began with 79 undergraduate and postgraduate students, including a dozen women. Veteran journalist Talcott Williams was installed as the schools director. When not attending classes and lectures, students scoured the city for news. Their more advanced classmates were assigned to cover a visit by U.S. President William Howard Taft, a sensational police murder trial and a womens suffrage march. A student from China went undercover to report on a downtown cocaine den. A journalism building was constructed the following year at Broadway and 116th Street on the western end of the campus. A statue of Thomas Jefferson was installed in June 1914 as a symbol of “free inquiry” exemplified by the debates between him and fellow American founder and Columbia alumnus, Alexander Hamilton, a statute of whom was unveiled directly across campus six years earlier.[8]

First journalism graduate school[edit]

In 1935, Dean Carl Ackerman, a 1913 alumnus, led the schools transition to become the first graduate school of journalism in the United States. As the schools reach and reputation spread (due in part to an adjunct faculty of working New York journalists and a tenured full-time faculty that included Pulitzer winners Douglas Southall Freeman and Henry F. Pringle and Life Begins at Forty author Walter B. Pitkin), it began offering coursework in television news and documentary filmmaking in addition to its focus on newspapers and radio. The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, the oldest international awards in journalism, were founded in 1938, honoring reporting in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism moved to the school in 1968. In 1958, the Columbia Journalism Award, the schools highest honor, was established to recognize a person of overarching accomplishment and distinguished service to journalism. Three years later, the school began publishing the Columbia Journalism Review.[9] A

Academic programs[edit]

The schools ten-month Master of Science (M.S.) program offers aspiring and experienced journalists the opportunity to study the skills, art and ethics of journalism by reporting and writing stories that range from short news pieces to complex narrative features. Some students interested in investigative reporting are selected to study at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, a specialization of the M.S. program. Documentary and data journalism specialization programs are offered as well. The M.S. program is also offered on a part-time basis.[14]

A year-long M.S. program in data journalism teaches the skills for finding, collecting and analyzing data for storytelling, presentation and investigative reporting.[15]

The school offers several dual-degree programs in collaboration with other schools at Columbia: journalism and computer science, journalism and international affairs, journalism and law, journalism and business, and journalism and religion. The school also offers international dual-degree programs with Sciences Po in Paris, France and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.[16]

The smaller and more specialized, nine-month Master of Arts (M.A.) program is for experienced journalists interested in focusing on a particular subject area: politics, science, business and economics or arts and culture. M.A. students work closely with journalism professors and take courses in other academic departments and schools at the university. The program is full-time.[17]

The doctoral program draws upon the resources of Columbia in a multidisciplinary approach to the study of communications. Ph.D. students craft individual courses of study to acquire deep knowledge in an area of concentration through research and coursework in disciplines ranging from history, sociology or religion to business or international affairs.[18]

The Bronx Beat[edit]

The Bronx Beat, established in 1981 and published Mondays, is the weekly student publication of Columbia Journalism School. It serves readers in the South and Central Bronx and covers education, jobs and unemployment, health care, crime, mass transportation, religion and the arts. Students stories are edited by colleagues, and by professional journalists from The New York Times and other New York dailies who line-edit copy and help with the papers layout. [19][better source needed]

Journalism awards[edit] The Broadway and 116th Street Main Gate outside Pulitzer Hall

Boylan, James. Pulitzers School: Columbia Universitys School of Journalism, 1903-2003 (2005).