What's on the horizon for college kids studying journalism & finance?

[SoCalDem]

It would seem that their pricey education is likely to amount to little, if any gain for most of them.

With banks & financial institutions merging and folding , where are their jobs going to come from. Surely before they get hired, they will have to wade though all the laid-off, experienced people ahead of them.

Journalism graduates face a similar fate, especially if they don't look like Barbie or Ken.

Apparently if you are not a nursing student or in medical school, your outlook is pretty bleak.

The millions of people laid off, are at the head of the line, so graduates are likely to be forced into jobs they probably never thought they would take..for a lot less pay than they need to live on and pay back those loans..
.................................................................................


Job Outlook for College Graduates Not Encouraging
Published 04 December 08 02:20 PM http://www.nextstudent.com/student-loan-blog/blogs/sample_weblog/archive/2008/12/04/2195.aspx

Up-and-coming college graduates may soon face one of the toughest job markets in years as they encounter employers who are scaling back hiring and a job market flooded with hundreds of thousands of recently unemployed workforce veterans.

Just last month, the U.S. Department of Labor reported a 6.5 percent unemployment rate, the highest rate seen in 14 years. And a recent annual employment report revealed that corporations plan to scale back hiring graduates of all degree levels by 8 percent over last year (“Economy Chills Hiring Prospects for College Graduates, Report Says,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 18, 2008).

The “2008-2009 Recruiting Trends” report, conducted by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, paints a very grim job outlook for college graduates, a dramatic change from only a few years ago. “In two short years,” the report states, “we have moved from a zenith of exuberant and aggressive college hiring, through a period of cautious optimism, to a place of quiet desperation.”

In the CERI survey, hiring projections varied by company size, industry, and location. Of the 945 employers who responded to the survey, 49 percent said they expected to decrease their total hiring this year, while 29 percent said they would increase hiring, and 20 percent planned to hire at the same levels as last year.

snip

With Limited Prospects, Students Should Start Job Searching Now

Defense and government organizations may be the hardest hit among larger employers, with expected 15-percent declines in hiring, while nonprofit organizations anticipate no change in hiring from the previous year.

The best job prospects for graduates are in the fields of technology and science, where oil and gas industry employers plan to hire 8 percent more bachelors degree graduates, and in the fields of medical manufacturing and healthcare, where employers say they will offer positions to 10 percent more associate degree graduates.


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[Deja Q]

1. Can't they use After Effects to superimpose a good body and hairdo on the ugly but good journalist?

:shrug:

[Taverner]

2. Journalist jobs were dying when I first went to college in 86

And that trend has been going steady since

[SoCalDem]

3. Has enrollment in classes dropped?

or are people still going in the same numbers, hoping to be "the one" ? It seems really unfair to have so many kids paying huge sums of money to learn a job that may not even be there for them when they graduate.

I know that skill sets do transfer, but it must really suck to WANT to be something specific, and then not be able to find a job :(

[Taverner]

4. Definitely - I have a Masters in Journalism in fact

Yet after 1 job paying $8 per hour PT after graduation, and no prospects....I found other work

Lots of my classmates have done the same. Those who stayed in journalism had day jobs, and never broke out of PT work.

Although, if you are an out-and-out Conservative, it is easier to get a job. True story.

[Kat45]

6. I also have a Masters in Journalism, early '80s

Even back then, the jobs paid shit, if you could even find one. I freelanced for a number of years, with a day job to pay my bills, then it got to the point where it wasn't even worth it to bother with the freelancing. In recent years, with newspapers closing left and right, that means even fewer jobs for journalists. And I don't think we've seen the end if newspaper closings; it does not seem to be a good business these days, especially with huge profits being the only criteria for businesses today.

[Berry Cool]

7. Bachelor's AND master's in journalism, mid-'80s.

The good news: Jobs in the field were hard to come by even then and paid crap, but I never wanted to be a journalist or work in the field anyway, I just wanted to write for a living, and found that by earning a J-school degree, I could hit the ground running better and faster than I could have with an English degree. I also had one little skill/virtue most j-schoolers don't: I actually cared about stuff like grammar, spelling and punctuation, so I could get editing jobs, rather than always having to be a creative wordsmithing diva expecting others to clean up after her sloppy work.

Even so, I have had to struggle and work for every job I've had, and some of them paid crap but it was still more than I could have made as a journalist. And I call myself lucky, because I'm not a miserably paid newspaper writer seeing my job die when my paper folded or outsourced to India. But there's also the downside: when you edit, you get treated like a janitor of words. You also get blamed if a single error sneaks into anything--and no credit for all the times it doesn't.

I did recently lose the best-paying job I ever had, so I'm back to square one. But I'm going to keep trying, and in the meantime use what I've learned and add to the skills I have to do what I love to do, one way or another. But boy, if I were going to school today, I don't know what I'd do. All I know is, if I didn't major in journalism, I sure wouldn't study finance, computing or law, either. Especially law. It's a quick way to saddle yourself with a backbreaking debt you can't repay any other way than to find an associate position in a big firm, starting at six figures...and those positions are drying up.

[BlueJazz]

5. For those Graduates, who are progressive and are seeking Journalist jobs...

..,they'll have to give up any integrity feelings they have now and bow-down to the right wing media.

"But this report is a Total Lie"
:"You want to keep this fucking job or what?"