 Is a journalism major or a journalism degree worth it? That's what we're going to be talking about today. And let's jump right into it. What is a journalism degree? Journalism is all about communicating important news that much of the time is going to be happening right now to your audience. So it's obviously going to involve analyzing and research, but you're going to have to do that really quickly. Now around 11,000 people here in the United States graduate with a bachelor's in journalism every year. So this is one of the more common degrees in some of the careers you might go for would be correspondent or reporter, technical writer or editor. So first thing we're going to talk about is salary or earning potential. And then we're going to go over some other important factors that will help you assess whether this degree is going to be worth going $40,000 in student loan debt for. According to pay scale, with this degree, you would expect to earn around $43,000 a year starting out and $78,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to a really high earning degree and a really low earning one. And you'll see that it's on the lower side, maybe average at best. I always recommend that you try to go for a career where you can make around $75,000 to $80,000 a year because studies have shown that you will maximize your happiness when you make that much. Making more than that doesn't really increase your happiness. And so I always say that it's generally a good idea, depending on the person, of course, to try to go for around $75,000 to $80,000. Now when it comes to different career paths you could go into, you could become a writer or an author and they make around $63,000 a year or $30 an hour. Editors make around $61,000 a year or $29 an hour. And reporters, correspondents or broadcast news analysts make around $46,000 a year or $22 an hour. So to put that in perspective, the average American makes around $50,000 a year. So this is below average if you want to become a news correspondent or a reporter, for instance. And that $50,000 number includes people who haven't gotten degrees. It even includes people who didn't get a high school diploma or didn't even go to school at all. Now journalism is basically a communications major and when you look at how much those majors make over a lifetime, you'll see that they make around $2.3 million and the average major makes around $2.4 million, so it's below average. Now keep in mind, this was census from the last 40, 50 years of data. The next 40 or 50 years could be completely different. Maybe journalism is the best major 50 years from now. But overall it is a sign that it's not great. It's also not horrible. There's lots of majors out there where you would make worse money, but I'm gonna have to give this one a seven out of 10 when it comes to salary. Next we're gonna be going over satisfaction which is extremely subjective. I like to focus on job satisfaction as well as meaning and job satisfaction is pretty self-explanatory and meaning is basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world. So for meaning, a journalism degree scored around 45% and you can compare that to a really good one and a really bad one and you'll see that it is below average. If you look at specific careers, editors have a meaning score of 42% and their job satisfaction is 65%. Which again here, meaning is gonna be below average but job satisfaction is maybe slightly above average and this of course is when you compare it to a really high scoring one and a low scoring one. Now when it comes to how much people regret getting their college degree, journalism is a communications major and they are the fifth most regretted type of degree. And the main reason people regret this is because the skills that you learn with a communications or a journalism degree tend to be a little bit too general. Not to say that these skills aren't valuable, of course communication is very valuable but a lot of the time the type of communication that you're gonna have to get good at is going to depend on what your job is or what industry you go into. So for instance, learning how to communicate on YouTube videos, learning how to make YouTube videos would be completely different than learning how to make a podcast. And same thing with being a journalist, maybe writing blogs or something along those lines. That type of communication is gonna be completely different. I think in our changing world, you also have to expand this out to things that are outside of your traditional careers like becoming a journalist or a reporter. A lot of the time learning good communication skills can be a great segue into becoming a content producer of some sort. Maybe starting a YouTube channel, a blog, a podcast, et cetera. And I think a lot of the careers you would go into, both traditional as well as non-traditional would be relatively satisfying. However, this is very subjective. Like I said, it could have everything to do with the people you work with, the career you work in, how much research you did, the industry you work in, the company you work for, et cetera. So it's extremely different depending on the situation and the personality. For one person, it could be a one out of 10 or a 10 out of 10. And so I'm gonna go ahead and give this one an eight out of 10 overall. Next, we're gonna be talking about demand. And this is basically how much demand there is on the job market for people who have these skills. So for instance, a writer or an author, there's around 131,000 jobs available right now. And over the next 10 years, it's going to decline by 2%. For editors, there's 118,000 jobs available right now. And over the next 10 years, it will be declining by negative 7%. And for reporters, correspondents, and news analysts, there's 52,000 jobs available right now. And over the next 10 years, negative 11%, yikes. Now, when it comes to unemployment rates, this is also not looking very good. So for instance, you can see this article from 2017 that says employment rates are improving for everyone but journalism majors. So because of the fact that so many people are graduating with this degree and there's not that many jobs out there, that is going to create fierce competition. On top of that, you don't actually have to get a journalism degree in order to become a journalist or a reporter or a news analyst. Sure, it would likely help you. It would teach you some of the skills you're going to need. And if you go to the right school and you network, that could also be really beneficial. But at the end of the day, you don't actually need a journalism degree and there's nothing stopping you from starting your own news channel on YouTube. And that's what tons of people have ended up doing. Studies have shown that most people do not trust traditional news, traditional media. And so what they're doing instead is they're turning to people on the internet, which they may not be much better, but they trust them more than the traditional news sources. Now, when you look up journalism degree on monster.com, and this is a little trick that I like to do just to gauge how much demand there is out there, you'll see that there's 11,000 jobs available. Now, you can compare that to a computer science degree and an anthropology degree, and you'll see that it's somewhere in the middle that's actually on the better side. But when you consider there's over 10,000 people graduating every year already with a degree, and on top of that, you don't actually need the degree in order to get into a lot of these careers. It doesn't look as good. And when big companies are surveyed about what college degree graduates, what college degree majors that they're looking for, communications is pretty middle of the pack. It's not that impressive. So overall, there's some upsides and there's some downsides to this one. I think that the future is going to be relatively bright for news, entertainment, education, that sort of thing. And I do think that you would learn a lot of intangible soft skills that might benefit you in your life, whether it's directly with your salary or indirectly later on. I think that there is a lot of opportunity for basically small news organizations or news outlets to pop up. Even just one person teams can pop up and people are much more susceptible to just listening to another person and their opinion on what's going on than listening to some talking head that's on the TV a lot of the time. Now again, I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Some random stranger's opinion on the internet, you probably need to take that with a grain of salt of course. But overall, that's kind of the direction that I see things going. So I'm going to give this one a seven out of 10 when it comes to demand. Next, we're going to be talking about X factors and this is basically anything that's important that we haven't talked about already. So we mentioned over a lifetime that communications degrees are in around 2.3 million, which is slightly below average. And if you look down the list at the different career paths that they could go down, it does seem like they are somewhat steady. So they're earning a decent amount of money no matter what career path they go down. These are obviously not amazing numbers, but it does stay somewhat steady. So for instance, if you went into an art related career, you'd make around 2.5 million over a lifetime, which is better than some of the others on the list. Now, when you look at journalism as a skill, you'll see that it ranks around 36 out of 100. And you can compare that to the highest ranking skill, software engineering, and a low ranking skill like industrial sewing. And you'll see that it's definitely on the lower side. So basically what this means is journalism is not one of those skills that's highly sought after, at least on the job market. Again, I think this is a skill that's valuable. It has value, but when it comes to businesses, you know, hiring managers and business owners looking to hire people, it doesn't look very good. Now there is a bright side here. When it comes to the chances that these types of skills are going to be automated, they're very low. You know, journalism is a communications degree and there's a very human element of communication that I don't think you'd ever be able to program into a robot, for instance. I could be wrong about this. Maybe someone's gonna, you know, look at this video a thousand years from now and laugh at me, but I don't think we're ever gonna see robot comedians, for instance. I found out people didn't get my joke. And when you look at reporters in correspondence, it shows there's only about 11% chance that they are automated. On top of that, journalism isn't gonna be one of the harder degrees. Now, I guess you could say that could be a positive or a negative, depending on the perspective that you're coming from. But there's some degrees out there that just have really high dropout rates because of how difficult that they are. So it's something that you want to keep in mind. But like I said here, when it comes to the X factors, a lot of it is not gonna be looking that good. I'm gonna go ahead and give this one a six out of 10. So the overall score when you add everything up and divided by four is going to be seven out of 10. You can make this degree work for you if you really do your research and you know exactly what career path you're going for. I would say for many people, it's not going to be worth it just because of the fact that the jobs that you're going for, you could absolutely get without getting a college degree or you could get a different college degree and still get that job. The trend that I mentioned earlier where a lot of people are just starting up their own news channels basically on YouTube and other websites, it's really big, honestly. Like a lot of people are having a ton of success doing that. And so you don't necessarily have to go the traditional route of getting a college degree in order to be a reporter or an investigative journalist or anything like that. So I think these are very valuable skills. Being able to do research, report on breaking events, that's never gonna go out of style. That's gonna be something that is valuable a thousand years in the future and was probably valuable a thousand years in the past as well. However, I would really look into this one and be careful before you commit to four years of your life going to college and probably going around $40,000 in debt. Now if you want help doing more research on college degrees and you don't want to wait for one of my videos to come out because I have like hundreds of them in the backlog right now, check out my Patreon down in the description below. I have the college degree ranker version 1.1 in there. I will also be updating it to make it even better as soon as everything calms down in the world. 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