I dont think the changing career argument holds up. If you work 2 to 3 years at a media outlet and decide to go into, say, PR I would imagine they would value your work experience over your GPA.

I agree with the grad school panic syndrome though, GPA would matter there. But then does grad school matter?

Your GPA should not be trash. Or, in other words, your GPA should be above 3.0.

If your school will actually give you a degree for a GPA below 3.0 (do schools do that?), the reason you want to have a reasonable GPA is in case you do decide to go to grad school, one day down the road. But it is totally true that NO NEWSROOM will ever care what your GPA was, nor will anyone working in a newsroom ever ask you (unless he is a complete idiot).

Many grad schools put more weight on your GRE scores and/or your personal essay than on your dusty old GPA (especially if you are older than 30 when you go back — assuming you completed the bachelor’s degree in your early 20s). This is bad news for people who are bad at taking tests, by the way, and even worse for people who are lousy at math.

But grad schools (including my own) are interested in your undergrad transcript, and if we see a lot of C’s and D’s in courses that maybe you should have done well in if you want to get a master’s degree in —— (whatever), we might not have a lot of faith in you. We don’t admit everyone, of course. And we have some strict rules about the numbers (especially the GRE scores) that we will not bend.

But what we don’t really care about is a 3.9 vs. a 3.7, or even a 3.5 vs. a 3.2. Heck, it’s an undergraduate GPA — probably you had one bad semester where your girl/boyfriend broke up with you, or your mom got sick, or something. Life happens. And perfect people are scary. You have to wonder, what the heck kind of robot gets a 4.0? Or even a 3.9?

I tend to assume that to get such a high GPA, the student sought out every “easy A’ class s/he could find.

Yeah, and that is definitely NOT who I want to admit to our graduate program — believe me!