OK, even I think that’s pretty funny. But “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams’ 1995 cartoon about job prospects for journalism majors isn’t very accurate any more. The latest Employment Projections from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics offer better, and certainly more current, information about your chances of landing a job with your journalism degree, and how much that job might pay.
The bureau tracks median wage and projected job openings for various job categories, including those that typically require a four-year college degree. Journalism school grads fit into many of those categories. Here’s a look at the latest-available (2019) median annual pay for each of them, along with the median for all jobs that require a bachelor’s degree:
Median 2019 salaries among selected categories of media professionals, compared with the median among all job categories requiring a bachelor’s degree.
And, for the same categories, here are projected numbers of job openings per year between 2019 and 2029:
Projected job openings per year, on average, between 2019 and 2029 for selected categories of media professionals, along with the median for all tracked jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.
It’s important to remember that these figures are conservative in a couple of ways. First, they describe some, but not all, types of jobs available to journalism school graduates. Also, as new models of journalism are emerging, the very definition of “reporter” is expanding. At the time former traditional reporter Curt Guyette helped break the story about toxic lead levels in Flint, Michigan’s, municipal water system, he was writing not for a local newspaper but for the Michigan Democracy Watch Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Was he a reporter? A public relations specialist? Something else? And none of these classifications can quite classify Elise Andrew, creator of the hit iflscience.com science blog and a woman Columbia Journalism Review has called journalism’s first self-made brand. There’s also no category for the growing number of “YouTubers” who attract huge online audiences and lucrative advertising dollars on YouTube by doing things like playing and reviewing video games, producing entertainment and comedy, sharing beauty tips, or offering commentary on pop culture.
So, questions like “will I get a job” and “how much money will I earn” turn out to be fairly difficult to answer for journalism school graduates. The Bureau of Labor Statistics figures probably should be thought of as typical ranges. The upper limits depend, really, on you – on how hard you’re willing to work and on how innovative and opportunistic you can be.