The job market for journalism and mass communication graduates in the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008 remained largely unchanged from a year earlier, according to a report released Thursday by the University’s James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research.

Nearly the same percentage of graduates in 2007 found full-time jobs within six to eight months of graduation as in the previous year, and salaries remained static, the UGA researchers reported.

Lee B. Becker and Tudor Vlad, who direct the Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates, released the results at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago. Becker is professor of journalism at UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of the Cox Center, while Vlad serves as associate director of the center.

“Given the turmoil in the traditional media industries and the large number of layoffs, particularly in the daily newspaper segment,” the researchers said in the report, “the consistency in the experiences of the 2007 graduates probably can be treated as good news.”

Nearly all of the 2007 bachelor’s degree recipients who looked for work had at least one in-person job interview in the six to eight months after graduation, the survey found.

On Oct. 31, 2007, 63.3 percent of the bachelor’s degree recipients had a full-time job, a figure nearly identical to what the 2006 graduates reported.

The survey is designed to monitor the employment rates and salaries of graduates of journalism and mass communication programs in the United States, including Puerto Rico. Since 1997, the survey has been conducted at UGA’s Grady College.

In 2007, 2,271 spring graduates from a probability sample of 83 universities around the country participated in the survey.

The study found that, as in past years, women had more success in the job market in 2007 than did men, and minority graduates were less likely to land a job generally and to find a job in the field of communication than were non-minority graduates.

The median salary earned by 2007 bachelor’s degree recipients was $30,000, exactly the same as the median salary earned by bachelor’s degree recipients in 2006, while the median salary for master’s degree recipients in 2007 was $40,000, $2,000 higher than a year earlier.

For eight of nine listed benefits in the survey, slightly larger percentages of graduates reported receiving the benefit in 2007 than did in 2006.

Job satisfaction increased significantly in 2007 for those with full-time work, with 42.1 percent of those so employed saying they were “very satisfied” with their job. The figure has not been higher since 1987.

- UGA News Service