Weekend reads: We don't need no education

If we want a more trusted - and inclusive - press, we should drop degree requirements

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Plummeting trust in the media is something that I’ve spent a lot of time researching, reporting on, and contemplating, penning “The Trust Spiral,” the 2024 Massey Essay on the state of the media, a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada. I often get asked what actions the mainstream media could take to re-establish trust. If the fourth estate was serious about restoring faith in its work, what might it do?

There are numerous ways that the press could begin to address widespread concerns around accuracy and bias, ranging from banning stealth edits and acknowledging past mistakes on big stories to discouraging news gathering journalists from airing their opinions on social media and increasing ideological diversity in coverage. At a very minimum, we in the press corps could stop broadcasting the fact that we no longer believe in objectivity and re-evaluate that counterproductive stance.

Still, I have become convinced that the single most effective tool the legacy media has to improve public trust is actually quite simple: Remove higher education as a requirement for hiring.

Simply put, the media has become a bubble, with a workforce that’s largely made up of liberal, urban, secular journalists who hold college degrees.

In American politics, we’ve heard a lot lately about the Diploma Divide, and have watched Kamala Harris win accolades for putting forward a proposal to remove unnecessary degree requirement for federal jobs. “Requiring a certain degree does not necessarily talk about one’s skills,” Harris has said. And she’s right.

Stony Brook University journalism professor Musa al-Gharbi, author of the forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, points out this week at Compact Magazine that Trump already issued an executive order on this in 2020. And it’s good policy, al-Gharbi writes, since “college degree requirements are a core driver of contemporary inequality.”

“Most who hold jobs that require degrees do work that is, at best, loosely related to their college major,” he argues. “They primarily learn how to do their jobs while on the job. People who didn’t go to college could do the same.”

“The main function degree requirements serve, in practice, is to freeze people from modest backgrounds out of jobs they would be perfectly capable of doing,” he adds.

If this is true of other industries, it’s certainly true of journalism.

I first encountered the idea of lowering the educational barriers to entry in an interview with Steve Krakauer, a former CNN executive and the current executive producer of The Megyn Kelly Show. Krakauer hosts a media criticism podcast, The Fourth Watch, and is the author of Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned its Principles, and Lost the People. “Great reporters don’t need a degree in journalism,” he writes in that book. “They don’t need a degree, period. It’s a mentality. You need a brain, a spine — and a relentless curiosity. Find better people who don’t care about how many Twitter followers they have or whether their report might piss someone off.”

It’s worth pointing out that media workers didn’t always have advanced degrees. During the course of my own career, I have watched the demographics in newsrooms shift. Some of the smartest Boomer editorial leaders I’ve worked with did not go to university, and one of my mentors did not finish high school. Contrast that to my own cohort, Gen X, who overwhelmingly hold Bachelor’s degrees. Millennial and Gen Z journalists, meanwhile, often have Master’s degrees — including from astronomically expensive Ivy League institutions such as Columbia.

Add to the inflated degree requirements the need to complete internships, which require young people to live in expensive cities and work for peanuts (or nothing at all), and we select for a certain class of people, namely those from wealthy families.

That is a small slice of the population. Actively filtering for it means that we wind up lacking diversity of all kinds — economic, racial, geographic, religious, and political — reinforcing the perception that we in the media belong to the elites, and do not represent the interests of ordinary people.

Now, some may object that we need higher education to do our jobs, which involve gathering and synthesizing complex information. But this is nonsense. I don’t know anyone who genuinely believes that, say, a geography degree — or, in my case, two in English Literature — prepare you in any practical way for the actual tasks that we perform, which are fairly straightforward. It doesn’t take specialized expertise to pick up a phone and ask questions the public wants answered. What it takes is training. (Plus, enough familiarity with a broad enough cross-section of people that you have an idea what those questions might be.)

The journalism grads that I have mentored over the years have started out knowing little about the skills of the trade. This is fine, and to be expected, since journalism is learned through doing. And there is no reason why we can’t be training a more diverse group of people to do what we do.

If we remove the degree requirement, we open the profession up to a wider pool of talent. We draw people from vastly different backgrounds, which automatically increases the range of viewpoints within newsrooms.

In removing that key barrier, we also demonstrate that we are living up to the ideals of diversity and inclusion that we so often espouse. By relaxing gatekeeping, we show that we care more about the health of our media, and by extension our democracy, than we do about maintaining our own competitive advantage.

The bonus is that we wouldn’t have to constantly defend ourselves against accusations of being elitist. Because we would have taken meaningful steps to be less elite.