The Trouble with PR Undergraduate Programs
I used to loathe hiring newly-minted PR undergraduates. They had been under-served by their expensive educations, focused on old-fashioned PR concepts and tactics. Most simply had to be re-trained to fit the agency workstyle: it could take more effort to re-educate PR grads than to hire raw recruits off the street! I've gotten over my trepidation about hiring PR degree-holders, but not my concerns about the state of PR undergraduate programs. I recently asked SHIFT staffers: If you got a degree in PR, what do you wish they had taught you that was not taught at school? If you had to hire someone with a PR degree, what do you wish they knew before their start-date?
Keep in mind that most of our staff is culled from the finest communications schools in Boston and the Bay Area. The answers were revealing.
- "I wish someone had taught us how to use basic PR database tools like Bacons, MediaMap, Lexis-Nexis, etc."
- "I wish I'd been taught how to deal with clients. No one talked to me about how professional I would need to be, on the phone, in email, in meetings, etc. I wish someone had even told me how to dress for a client meeting!"
- "I wish that we had had a chance to interact with a handful of real-world journalists to get a sense of how they like to be pitched."
- "No one at school ever talked about the rise of PR 2.0 stuff like blogs, wikis, RSS & podcasts."
- "I wish someone had taught us that there is more to 'PR writing' than press releases and PR plans that never went beyond the professor's in-box; I wish I had been required to write award submissions and speaker abstracts and pitches and even blog posts!"
Perhaps the best response came from a rising star at SHIFT who's in a graduate program at Boston University:
Next post: ideas on how-to fix some of the problems in the PR undergraduate curriculum."I teach a class of undergrads. Most of them have no idea how to craft a pitch or write a press release though they can recite every work of Bernays’ biography. Interestingly, PR majors at BU are required to take media relations and learn how to best work with journalists (which, of course, I agree with). However, journalism majors are not required to take any PR-related courses to learn the flip side of the industry. This sends the message from the get-go that PR folks are a nuisance and there is no need to learn what value PR can provide. BU has the oldest PR program in the nation and if this institution can’t change things, then how will PR and journalism ever be seen as a happy marriage rather than a stalker-boyfriend relationship?"
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Comments
I believe there is a problem with PR programs in the undergraduate programs these days. Luckily though, my university (Auburn) IS teaching us how to use social media tools. I am reluctant at times to mess with it but I truly believe it is beneficial to me for a job in the PR world.
It seems as though some schools are working their way up the ladder by teaching the new tools for PR.
But right behind that I believe teaching both PR and journalism majors how to interact with one another needs to be taught. Currently as a student I do not feel as though we are trying to connect with the journalism students. It seems as though we are still in the same college (liberal arts) but that is it. I was required to take the basic journalism classes (i.e. Newspaper Fundamentals, Newswriting) but that was all I had to do .
From what I understand journalists play a good role in the PR function. They are the ones getting our press releases and having a class that shows both majors how to interact with each other seems to be essential for the future. Curriculum for PR needs to change if schools want their graduates to truly be prepared for the real world.
Posted by: Tuan | June 26, 2006 07:05 PM
As a recent graduate with an undergrad in PR, I can really appreciate this article. One of the most shocking things I discovered upon graduation is that PR is not a career in which everything you need to know, you know when you graduate. In fact, I would now say that PR is one of those fields like IT, or Medicine, in which information is always changing and advancing. I'd say the REAL learning starts after you leave college.
I must say, however, that my undergrad did prepare me in every way that it could.It has been a wonderful experience to find out that I was given the right tools in college, and that I merely need to know how to put them into use once I graduated.
Posted by: Jaime | August 15, 2006 12:32 PM
Although I am still an undergraduate myself, I can understand entirely the opinion that it “could take more effort to re-educate PR grads than to hire raw recruits off the street.” I have found through a mixture of experience, research and reading interviews and articles with CEO’s, that each individual Public Relations Consultancy has entirely differing views on everything from work ethic, to whether new media such as blogs are worthwhile. Therefore, the content of our degrees and the theoretical models we are taught, are only going to work effectively in a selection of Consultancies. That said, I believe I am studying a particularly useful degree, which is so diverse that it consequently educates me in how to alter my way of working in order to conform to any Agency’s way of working. I am taught nearly all of the skills mentioned in your article’s ‘degree wish-list’, and wholly agree that they are necessary.
Despite the obvious teething problems that I think should be expected when employing an undergraduate, I would urge employers to continue to do so, as everyone has to start somewhere, and the likelihood is that any effort invested in a student will be more than equaled in the effort they put into working for you. In my opinion it really is imperative to remember that these undergraduates like myself, are the future of the industry, and the better we are trained, the more talented the industry will become as a whole. After all, everyone has to start somewhere.
Posted by: Joanna Tillott | April 18, 2007 09:27 AM