In March 2008, Solana Larsen, a prominent blogger and international journalist, made a startlingly prediction while participating in a forum at Harvard U. Foreign correspondents, she said, will no longer exist by 2013.

Larsen’s two-minute “provocation” sparked a firestorm of controversy. According to her blog, she “spent the rest of the day dodging journalists and editors who wanted to tell me I was wrong, naïve, and even careless.”

Now, more than two years later, foreign reporting looks as bleak as ever. Steadily declining ad revenue accelerated by the 2008 economic crisis left many news outlets on life support.

The dire economic conditions forced nearly all media organizations to slash budgets and cut staff in attempts to remain solvent. Foreign news bureaus — with their rising costs and an increasingly uninterested American audience — are often among the first to go.

Larsen’s grim prediction is not the first of its kind, nor will it be the last.

The uncertainties surrounding foreign correspondence reflect a much larger trend in professional journalism — the race to reveal its future.

The anxieties that fill newsrooms across the country have permeated college academics. As news outlets struggle to redefine what it means to be a professional journalist, journalism schools struggle to redefine what it means to be a student journalist.

Media integration, a buzzword in both professional and collegiate journalism, has emerged as a popular aim for newsrooms and classrooms alike. Recent plans for restructuring U. Kansas’ journalism school emphasize media integration as a primary goal.

Starting in the fall of 2011, Columbia U. will offer a combined computer science and journalism master’s degree, with an emphasis on multimedia skills and comprehensive IT knowledge.

And U. Missouri’s journalism school has decided on a much different approach. Rather than following the media integration trend, Missouri’s new program requires students to major in one of 25 separate interest areas.

So what do these academic disparities mean for us, the students? How do we prepare ourselves for a future that remains so uncertain? In my case, if Larsen’s prediction becomes true and my dreams of becoming a professional foreign correspondent are shattered, where does that leave me?

Though the differences between journalism schools signal a largely undecided future, they do share at least one common thread — the need for students to be adaptable and innovative.

The same can be said for all students, not just those in journalism. A CBS News poll found that nine in 10 Americans think today’s job market requires different skills than it did 20 years ago.

As new technologies, models and ideas replace old ones at an exponential rate, 20 years will soon become 10, if not even less. Having the ability to adapt to a continuously changing job market and the willingness to try new things are essential supplements to any college degree.

Despite their tentative forecasts, the futures of journalism and other fields are nothing to run from. The sense of “anything goes” can be equally liberating and exciting, which is why I’ll be spending the next six weeks in Europe exploring the current state of foreign correspondence. If college journalism is any indication, what happens in the future remains anyone’s guess.