By Kevin McCauley
The job market for 2011 journalism graduates improved a bit over their 2010 counterparts, but significantly lags the offers received by graduates in 2000, according to a report released Aug. 9 by the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Of last year’s graduates, 72.5 percent of them had at least one job offer or a solid prospect, up from 68.5 percent in 2010. More than eight-in-ten (82.4 percent) of the class of 2000 had an offer or prospect upon finishing school.
Females did better than men on the job front as many of them opted for PR and advertising jobs rather than media work.
The salary of a 2011 graduate ticked up $1,000 to $31,000. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $1,852 less than a graduate of 2000.
The report concludes that the job prospects for journalism and mass communications graduates in recent years “has been terrible,” and the reported recovery that is “only a modest one.”
Authors Lee Becker, Tudor Vlad and Konrad Kalpen note the newspaper part of the labor market is “mature at best and certainly declining in terms of employment by the traditional organizations.”
Television has always had low salaries, “in part, in seems, because it remains an attractive field for young people who are willing to work in it, quite literally, for nothing.”
The authors fault J-School grads for not “tapping into the most vibrant parts of the occupational arena,” which explains why average starting journalism salaries are nearly the same as 25 years ago.
Journalism and mass communication are not growth segments,” according to the authors. “That cannot be good news for those contemplating careers in the communication occupations, for those who seek to educate them or for the employers who need the best and brightest to survive in what almost certainly will be an even more competitive environment,” they concluded.
The study, which was released at the Assn. for Education Journalism and Mass Communication’s annual convention in Chicago, also measured media usage.
Only four-in-ten of the respondents read a newspaper the day before they took the survey. Three-quarters of the respondents viewed news online the day prior, and more than 90 percent checked in with a social media network.
The survey sponsors include Hearst Corp., Gannett, National Assn. of Broadcasters, Scripps Howard Foundation and the McCormick Foundation.
More than 80 schools participated in the survey including Syracuse University, Ohio Wesleyan, Marquette, Temple, Saint Bonaventure, Quinnipiac, Northwestern, Rutgers, Santa Clara, Auburn, Michigan State and University of Massachusetts, |