MSNBC today features an article on the job disaster that the GenY/Millennials are facing. These are people born in the 1980s and 1990s who who were unfortunate enough to enter the job market at one of the worst possible times in history. The piece features one person, but if you were wondering how this nice person isn’t able to find a job, you need look no further than this sentence: “Armed with an undergraduate degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine, and experience from an internship, the 23-year-old Barreto believed he had a better chance than many of his peers to find a job.” Article
The public relations field is absolutely deluges with unemployed journalists looking for work. And we’re talking about people with far, far more experience than people just graduating from college now. One colleague of mine commented that his advice to college students working on public relations degrees was to “change their majors.” That’s a pretty grim assessment, but likely an accurate one. The days of following your bliss wherever it leads you are gone, that is, if you don’t want to live in a van down by the river. While, I can’t claim any kind of great practical insight, i just happened to get a degree in economics because I found it interesting, but if one is going to go through the trouble and cost of obtaining a degree, a degree in journalism probably isn’t the wisest thing.
