The College of Communications is the largest nationally accredited journalism-mass communication program in the United States.
The college earned the No. 2 spot in the William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards program in the combined intercollegiate writing and broadcast news standings for academic years 2001-2002 through 2005-2006. The standings are based on total points accumulated in each of the competitions during the five-year period by students enrolled in the country’s 108 nationally-accredited programs. The Hearst competition often is called “the Pulitzers of college journalism.”
The college is the only program in the country to have captured six consecutive (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007) national top-10 finishes in both intercollegiate writing and intercollegiate broadcasting in the Hearst Foundation's Journalism Awards Program.
The college's Ph.D. program ranked eighth in the country in the National Communication Association's (NCA) 2004 doctoral reputation study (mass communication). The Ph.D. program in mass communication was ranked No. 1 in 2005 in the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, an index that ranks doctoral programs in 104 fields, based on the scholarly productivity of their faculty.
The college is home to seven institutes, centers or research labs that span multiple intersections of mass communication: the Institute for Information Policy, the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication, the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, the Jim Jimirro Center for the Study of Media Influence, the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment, the Dow Jones Center for Editing Excellence and the Media Effects Research Laboratory.
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 drawn 20 Pulitzer-Prize winners since 1999), and five endowed lecture or symposium series.
The college's faculty boasts a healthy balance of academic and professional credentials, averaging about 10 years of teaching experience and 10 years of professional media experience.
