Average journalism major starting salary is...

After eight years, I topped out at $31,000. Same place I started.

My wife just took a new job, and she'll make $47,000 base plus a potential $1,000 monthly bonus. She's still a class away from finishing her associate's degree. Sometimes, she'll look at me and say, "You really pissed your youth away."

 

A lot of people lie about what they make. It took me some time when I was younger but thanks to a few folk leaving their check stubs around, I was amazed. @Dick, many of those at large dailies had to pay their dues at smaller dailies.

 

I wonder what the highest salary one can attain - in any field - is from just an undergraduate degree. Probably some sort of finance/analyst job with an investment bank, I'd assume. Or perhaps engineering.

 

Higher than that.

 

Well, are we talking just newspapers? Or ALL journalism graduates?

There are plenty of people I went to school went who made it very clear they felt it beneath them to work for a newspaper paying less than 35K. Again, there are other things that journalism people can do that tend to pay more than newspapers.

 

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard during his junior year. Harvard did award him an honorary degree in 2007, when Gates already had set the world record for earnings by a college dropout.

 

Yes. I've read his Wiki page, too.

My point was: There's no such thing as "highest salary attainable with an undergrad degree" or any other qualification. Any salary you can command is attainable. It's not like there's a salary floor/cap for dropouts or Ph.Ds.

 

Me too. At my last job I worked with a number of college interns and heard about others through the grapevine. The vast majority who went into newspapers after graduating were going to smaller papers and making much less than $41K.
That's not to say some journalism grads go straight to a big daily. I know some do, but I really question whether enough grads go straight to a big daily and make enough to raise the average to $41K, in light of so many grads taking entry-level Podunk Press jobs for $20-25K. And that's to say nothing about some of these big dailies cutting a ton of jobs in recent years.

 

I didn't get that from Wiki. I got it from an ESPN guy. He got it from Wiki.

 

It would be mathematically impossible for the majority of new grads to go to large papers. Just not enough spots. There are far more Podunk Presses than there are New York Times.

 

The majority may not go to large papers, but when you consider industry publications, other communications jobs, technical writers, and non-published entities such as Bloomberg and Reuters, as well as grads who didn't go on to work in journalism, the math becomes more reasonable. I think $40,900 seems high, but not unbelievable.

 

I graduated college in 1999 and got a news reporting job paying $24,000 a year. I knew people who were graduating with the same degree I got, from the same college, who weren't clearing $20K, so I thanked my lucky stars and thought it was all the money in the world.
Almost six years later, I was making around $28,000, and jumped to a vastly smaller paper in the middle of nowhere but got a $3K raise. It's been seven years, and I'm making $35,000 base. I have overtime and other projects to keep me a little more flush, so I'd say I'm up around $40K. But I'd say I hustle for every buck I make.