Journalism students graduating from both Columbia University and CUNY's Graduate School in New York are finding jobs in their field, surprising to many, as many news outlets cut back, Daily Finance reported Thursday.

At Columbia, 64 percent of Graduate School of Journalism students (194 in total) found employment in their field after graduation.

Elizabeth Weinreb Fishman, Columbia University's associate dean of communications, told Daily Finance that the 64 percent recent graduates now employed in the field is actually on the low side, as many students have received job offers in the past couple of weeks, following graduation. She said this is due to the prestigious Columbia name and "the truly prodigious efforts of our career services team."

At CUNY's journalism programme, of the last class to graduate (in December 2008), with 45 students, 60 percent now have full-time jobs in the journalism field, while 15 percent have "quasi-full-time internships or freelance gigs," Stephen B. Shepard, the school's dean, told Daily Finance. He credits this to students learning to practice the trade across all media platforms, which makes them valuable to newsrooms beefing up digital areas.