What Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

For Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $38,911 one year after graduation, $62,608 at four years, $67,287 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 1,402 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

The trajectory is the story here: $38,911 at year one, $62,608 at year four, $67,287 at year five. That is 73% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $28,376 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other post a median of $39,194, non-recipients $40,415. That $1,221 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Inside its own CIP family, Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other ranks 2 of 5 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $63,023. Its closest sibling is Journalism at $63,023, below this field's $67,287. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other stands number 88 by five-year earnings and number 143 by first-year earnings, and number 141 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 53 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other graduate owe? $23,000, the graduate-weighted median over 11 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 59%, or 7.1 months of gross pay at the $38,911 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $261 a month with $8,367 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Where a student studies inside this field matters at least as much as the field itself. These five programs post the strongest five-year medians in Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by University of Minnesota-Twin Cities at $73,252, against a national field median of $67,287.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $73,252 as a market fact before reading it as a quality verdict. Costs for the same programs are checkable in the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 26.3% of the 1,402 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $73,252 sits 9% above the national field median of $67,287. Its median debt, $15,500, runs below the field median of $23,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.