If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in journalism, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #46 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in Wisconsin to determine which ones were the best for journalism students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 310 bachelor's degrees in journalism to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Journalism School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of journalism for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality journalism program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to journalism students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other journalism students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt journalism students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized journalism related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for journalism students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Journalism Bachelor's Degree Schools in Wisconsin list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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University of Wisconsin - Madison is a good decision for individuals interested in a bachelor's degree in journalism. UW - Madison is a very large public university located in the large city of Madison.
Bachelor's recipients from the journalism major at University of Wisconsin - Madison earn $2,348 above the average graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Marquette University is a great option for students interested in a bachelor's degree in journalism. Marquette is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Milwaukee.
Soon after graduation, journalism bachelor's recipients generally make about $38,700 at the beginning of their careers.
It is difficult to beat University of Wisconsin - Whitewater if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in journalism. Located in the distant town of Whitewater, UW - Whitewater is a public university with a large student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the journalism program earn an average of $36,139 in the first couple years of their career.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).