Gone are the days when publishing houses were filled with English majors who spent their days pretending to enjoy editing the next great American novel when what they really wanted to do was write it. Sherman Raskin, the director for more than 30 years of Pace University’s M.S. in publishing program in New York City, says that “today publishing is more than an accidental profession.”

As the profession continues its evolution, the graduate programs tasked with preparing the next generation of industry leaders must also evolve and adapt. PW checked in with several of these programs to see how they are meeting the challenges of this evolution and adaptation, what’s new, where there’s common ground between them, and what distinguishes one from another.

A New Diversity

Although it cannot be—and is not—taken for granted at any of the institutions we spoke with, diversity is the norm and a source of pride on today’s campuses. Raskin notes that, right from the beginning, three decades ago, the Pace program’s vision was to have a student body that was not only white but African-American, Hispanic, and Asian, and that was made up of men and women from all over the country. Now, at Pace and all the other programs we spoke with, the mix of students is globally diverse.

Marshall Warfield, who recently took over as director of the master’s degree program in publishing at Rosemont College in southeastern Pennsylvania, says that “the makeup of the student body is one of the things that I’m most proud to inherit and hope to grow.” In his Tuesday-evening poetry class, two students who sit across the table from each other have remarkable backgrounds. They are a study in what could be called a new diversity that goes beyond ethnicity and color to life experiences, age, and more.

Twenty-something Aurora Uwase Munyabera is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who settled in the Midwest with her family and was working as an administrative assistant in a dental office before deciding to enroll in the publishing program at Rosemont. Now, Warfield reports, Munyabera has started working at Great Jones Street, which publishes short fiction through an app for Android and Apple devices. Her marketing and promotion role at the company takes her all over the country.

Laurie Darbes is a military veteran who saw action in 2003 during the Iraq War. “Now she’s here getting a double degree because she wants to create a platform for veterans who have experienced trauma to share their stories and begin the healing process,” Warfield explains. These two women, along with a 60-something student and a young woman from India, comprise a mix that’s “magic,” Warfield adds.

At both Simon Frasier University (SFU) in Vancouver and NYU, international students are approximately one-third of the mix. Andrea Chambers, academic program director and clinical assistant professor at the NYU School of Professional Studies Center for Publishing, is confident that the international trend is growing. “It introduces global perspectives that foster interesting conversations and underscores publishing as a global industry,” she says.

There’s one divide in the industry that is not racial, ethnic, cultural, or geographic and that stubbornly remains: a gender gap at the highest levels. All the program directors cited the predominance of women as a constant factor in enrollment. And yet, as Raskin notes, a dearth of women in CEO positions in the industry persists.

The Digital Norm

“There’s nothing nondigital,” says John Rodzvilla, senior electronic publisher in residence and graduate program director for publishing and writing at Boston’s Emerson College. “E-books are normalizing and are just part of the industry.” But he adds a caveat: “Magazines are different. They are still trying to figure out print versus Web versus what.” While it seems that just yesterday the phrase digital publishing struck fear and dread in the hearts and souls of those working in the industry, now it’s a given that the hub of publishing and all its attendant spokes are transmedia, multiplatform, and digitally dependent.

Chambers reports that “our student body is coming into the program with much more digital knowledge.” And that, in turn, has influenced the curriculum. The NYU program no longer includes basics in areas such as social media but instead provides more in-depth instruction on such topics as how to use social media to build an effective marketing campaign or how to modify a social media strategy that has gone awry.

At Emerson, one of three required courses is Electronic Publishing Overview. At NYU, one course offering is Digital Financials: The Web, Apps, Tablets, and Video. SFU’s program has a class titled Technology and New Forms. Regardless of a course’s title, all programs incorporate every aspect of new media and new technologies—including mobile-first strategies, analytics, metadata, Web development, and more—throughout the curricula, whether a course is for design, marketing, production, or distribution.

The Ivory Tower Meets the Real World

Another commonality among the programs is the balance of academic study and dealing with real-world challenges. All schools demand that students study at least the basics of every facet of publishing, from acquisition and editing to production, design, marketing, and publicity. However, there are a range of approaches, with some programs emphasizing the business over the creative aspects or vice versa.

Warfield wants a multitude of conversations going on between students on different tracks of specialization to foster understanding. “What do designers need to know about publishers?” he asks. “What do publishers need to know about designers?” Coming from the more literary purview of Drexel Publishing Group, he jumped at the opportunity to join Rosemont because of “[the program’s] firm commitment to every aspect of publishing,” he says. And he wants to increase the program’s focus on business: “These days, anyone who gets an arts- or culture-related degree—and I would put publishing in that category—needs to have experience in the business side of things. They need to understand profit and loss, risk, analytics, and the mechanics of it all.”

On the other hand, Warfield is happy to have an office right next to the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing, which proximity allows a seamless synergy between the two programs. He notes that “our students love the book as an object, and the novel is important to them as a concept.”

At SFU, because of available sources of funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canada Book Fund among other governmental organizations and NGOs, the program features a strong emphasis on research. Suzanne Norman, lecturer in SFU’s publishing program and director of their publishing workshops, describes the program as a hybrid between academia and industry: “Students will work with professors on a particular research project that may have come out of the industry, but also may have originated, at least partly, in academic work.” Students are required to do book and/or tech projects that are presented to a panel made up of industry professionals, “so they get real world feedback,” Norman explains. “Where our projects stand apart from all other programs in Canada is that we work very much side by side with industry, looking at some of their concerns, which then become a basis for our research.”

Both NYU and Pace, perhaps because they are situated in the city where the industry is concentrated and thus have access to a plethora of top instructional talent from the Big Five trade houses and beyond, place a premium on readying the next crop of publishing leaders. Raskin’s Pace program is designed to graduate students who can move up the career ladder quickly, he says. NYU’s program fosters real-world, real-workplace experience by providing its students hands-on involvement in simulations of what they would do on the job, from developing marketing plans to editing jacket copy and manuscripts.

NYU’s Chambers explains that, while the archetype of the master’s student who was an English major who dreamed of becoming a book editor still exists, “something has clicked” and “[students] now see the bigger picture,” she says. “To get into publishing, you need it all—digital and marketing, publicity and promotion.” She notes that today’s students come from a wide range of backgrounds including business, marketing, and bookselling. More importantly, many more students than in the past see themselves in future positions beyond editing, in such areas as digital, marketing, and sales.

Alliances and Hybrids

Blurring the lines further between the classroom and the workplace are a variety of alliances and partnerships between the academy and the business world. Last year SFU coordinated the Emerging Leaders in Publishing Summit, which brought together three interest groups: students from the master’s program; a range of industry professionals, including representatives from Booknet Canada, Kobo, Indigo, S&S Canada, PRH Canada, and other publishing houses; and a group of participants (emerging leaders from various publishing or publishing-related businesses) who pay to enroll in the weeklong program. The program, which SFU’s Norman describes as having an immersive, pressure-cooker environment, was very well received and will take place again in February.

NYU will continue its alliance with the NYU Press. As a part of that partnership, Ellen Chodosh, the press’s director, teaches a course in the master’s program on book strategies. Course participants also work closely with the team at NYU Press, attending sales conferences and seeing the inner workings of a small press.

This fall saw the launch of a new master’s program at Emerson—an M.F.A. in popular-fiction writing and publishing that is designed for those who want to pursue a career in writing in the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, thriller, or young adult. Rodzvilla points out that these genres demand that authors have a knowledge of both traditional and self-publishing business models.

And at Rosemont, a streamlined double-degree program allows students to attain both an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in publishing. By eliminating overlapping courses, the number of credits needed to achieve the double degree is significantly reduced.

A New Outlook

Ultimately, what this vibrant array of programs means for publishing is a fresh new outlook from a forward-thinking group of students who are fascinated by publishing as a medium. “Students coming into the program see publishing as an industry of opportunity,” Chambers says. “They are open-minded and see that publishing has a new face. While the days of publishing strictly books and magazines is over, they view it as a broader and more global window of opportunity.”

Warfield echoes that sentiment. “The idea that publishing is dead is an outdated cliché,” he says. “No one is lamenting the future of publishing—it’s just going to look a lot different than it did 10 years ago, and a hell of a lot different than it did 20 years ago.”