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:

"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?"

Next post: ideas on how-to fix some of the problems in the PR undergraduate curriculum.