UNIVERSITY PARK – With more than 3,400 undergraduate majors and graduate students, Penn State’s College of Communications is the largest nationally accredited program of its kind. In fall 1995, it enrolled 1,658 undergraduate majors and graduate students. In fall 2005, it enrolled 3,413 — a 106 percent increase.
“Our growth has been explosive,” said College of Communications Dean Doug Anderson in a report given to Penn State’s Board of Trustees on Sept. 15. “Fortunately, because of strong support from the University, our professional constituents and our friends and alumni, we’ve been able to capitalize on our enrollment increases.”
Anderson said the college seeks to become and be recognized as the most comprehensive and best-balanced accredited communications program in the country — one that emphasizes professional preparation of undergraduates; one that provides a blend of conceptual and technique courses; one that operates an academically rigorous graduate program; and one that insists upon scholarly, professional and creative productivity from its faculty.
“The college believes that it has the resources, the critical mass and the capability to achieve its goal,” Anderson said. “We are not one-dimensional, focusing on the practical at the expense of an intellectually stimulating environment or vice versa.”
The college’s degree programs cover the communications spectrum: advertising/public relations, film-video, journalism, media studies and telecommunications.
“This broad base positions us well as all forms of communications stretch their wingspans in the 21st century,” Anderson said. “All of our majors are being impacted by the transition to digital applications.”
External validation confirms that the college’s goal of being one of the country’s best-balanced programs is being met.
The college earned the No. 2 spot in the William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards Program in the combined intercollegiate writing and intercollegiate broadcast news standings for academic years 2001-02 through 2005-06.
The standings are based on total points accumulated by students in each of the contests during the five-year period by the country’s 108 accredited undergraduate programs.
The Hearst competition often is called “the Pulitzers of college journalism.”
The college’s doctorate program in mass communications was ranked No. 8 in 2004 by the National Communications Association.
“We are the only program in the country to make the top 10 in both the undergraduate national Hearst competitions and the NCA’s doctoral rankings,” Anderson said. “That speaks well of our balanced approach.”
The college boasts a strong array of special programs, including the Washington, D.C., Communications and Democracy Semester; the Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers, which has brought 16 Pulitzer Prize-winners to campus since 1999; and the Don Davis Program in Communications Ethics, a newly launched broad-based ethics-across-the-curriculum effort headed by the Don Davis professor of ethics, Patrick Parsons.
The college also is home to seven institutes, centers and research labs: the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment, the Media Effects Research Laboratory, the Institute for Information Policy, the Jimirro Center for the Study of Media Influence, the Dow Jones Center for Editing Excellence, and its two newest, the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism and the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication.
“The John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, which is directed by the newly appointed Knight chair in sports journalism and society, Malcolm Moran, is a unique program that possesses national prominence,” Anderson said. “And the Page Center, the brainchild of distinguished alumnus Larry Foster, is already making national waves.” Anderson also noted the talented and balanced college faculty, one that boasts a healthy blend of academic and professional credentials.
He added that the college’s surge in enrollment has been more than matched by the retention and graduation rates of its students. Some 81 percent of the most recent freshman class for the college for whom statistics are available earned their Penn State baccalaureate degrees in four years.
GantDaily’s editor, Dawn Walls, placed sixth in the William Randolph Hearst Journalism Foundation’s Journalism Awards Program.