Grad school was briefly the place to be for me too.
Of course, my experience was not because of journalism finding its feet in a post war boom.
I came went to grad school, largely, because an undergraduate degree is nearly worthless now. Grad school became something to stand out from the crowd.
Ironically, few cared what degrees I had in the end. And my degrees were from the “wrong” schools anyway.
Twenty years later it feels like the internet is making all formal education irrelevant.
For a time in the late Fifties and early Sixties, graduate school, for the literary-minded, was briefly the place to be. The Korean War was over; Vietnam had not yet heated up. Journalism was soon to become an attractive and a lucrative place to be, but the New Journalists who propelled it—Tom Wolfe, David Halberstam, Marshall Frady, Larry L. King, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and others—had not yet collectively kicked in.
-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)