Journalism ranked as the top regretted college major amid declining trust in corporate media.
At a time when the majority of Americans recognize the corporate media are dishonest, journalism tops the list of the 10 most regretted college majors, according to a ZipRecruiter survey from last November that CNBC republicized on Sunday. A whopping 87 percent of journalism graduates regret their degree choice, with sociology, liberal arts, communications, and education next on the regret list. Of job seekers with college degrees overall, 44 percent regret their chosen major.
It’s conventional wisdom that students who spend exorbitant amounts of money on a college degree, or take out monstrous loans to do so, should consider whether their chosen field of study will leave them with useful and valuable skills. Fields that prize technical expertise, like medicine or engineering, are generally safer financial bets that justify hefty education bills, as one Georgetown study showed. In the ZipRecruiter survey, the least regretted college major was computer and information studies, with criminology, engineering, and nursing following in the ranking.
But modern J-school students, on the other hand, typically write massive tuition checks to be instructed in the propaganda that passes for journalism at most universities and in the insulated newsrooms their students populate. They are taught by people like The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the error-plagued revisionist history known as The 1619 Project, often at expensive “elite” schools. A study from the Journal of Expertise studied two major publications, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and found that 44 percent of Times employees and 50 percent of Journal employees attended elite schools. Further, approximately 28 percent of the papers’ overall editors and writers attended Ivy League schools.
In the 2022-2023 school year, the average cost of “tuition and fees” alone for undergraduate journalism per year was $10,440 for in-state and $30,248 for out-of-state. (Of course, the ones from Ivy Leagues are far pricier.) The average journalist’s salary comes out to $45,307 per year.
Meanwhile, Americans’ faith in corporate media is evaporating. A Gallup study found that Americans’ trust in media has been in steady decline since the 1970s. In 1976, 72 percent of Americans said they trusted media a “great deal/fair amount,” plummeting to only 34 percent in 2022.
The field that used to be known as “reporting” has become so lazy that some outlets are outsourcing their employees’ jobs to artificial intelligence. The Columbus Dispatch, a Gannett-owned paper, was mocked for a laughably bad piece of sports reporting written by AI. News Corp Australia churns out thousands of AI-created articles every week.
“ChatGPT will become a regular part of many journalists’ tool kits,” declared a Times op-ed.
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