A recent college graduate has spent six months applying to writing jobs at newspapers and magazines with zero offers, and the only advice the commentariat can muster is: adjust your expectations and go into marketing. That's not a career plan — that's an indictment of the entire higher-ed racket.
The graduate, writing under the pen name "Unpublished" to the syndicated Dear Annie column, laid it out plainly: "I've applied to more jobs than I can count at newspapers and magazines but haven't landed a single offer. Everyone keeps saying 'the job market is tough right now,' but knowing that doesn't pay rent. I still live with my parents, and I'm dying to get my own place."
Six months. No offers. Living with mom and dad. This is the return on a degree that likely cost five or six figures.
Annie's answer? Pivot to marketing, PR, or corporate communications. "Writing skills aren't limited to bylines," she wrote. "Expand your job search, take one of those jobs and get your own apartment. Keep writing on the side."
Translation: the credential you were sold won't get you the job you were promised, so go write press releases for a company that makes widget coatings, and do the thing you actually trained for on your own time, for free, after hours.
The column ran across three outlets — the Mechanicsburg Patriot News, NJ.com, and MLive Michigan — with telling differences in framing. The Patriot News headline put the burden squarely on the graduate: "adjusting expectations may help this college grad." NJ.com went clinical: "College grad has been applying for 6 months for writing jobs." MLive at least centered the human stake: "I know the job market is tough, but I need to move out of my parents' place."
None of the outlets touched the structural question: who told this young person to take on debt for a writing degree in a industry that has been shedding jobs for two decades? Who profited from that transaction? Not the graduate — she's unemployed and sleeping in her childhood bedroom.
The universities cashed the tuition checks. The loan servicers will collect the interest. The advice columnists will tell her to lower her sights. And the same institutional voices that built this conveyor belt will insist that taxpayers — including people who never set foot on a campus — should pick up the tab for student loan bailouts.
The job market for journalism and creative writing has been collapsing for a generation. Every newsroom layoff cycle, every magazine fold, every substack pivot confirms it. The universities selling these programs know the numbers. They enroll students anyway. That's not education — that's a billing scheme with a syllabus.
The open question isn't whether this graduate should take the PR job. She probably should — rent doesn't pay itself. The question is when the people who profited from selling her an impossible dream will be asked to account for it.
