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Communications professors

Official title Communications Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1122)

Also called Comm studies professor, Media studies professor, Journalism professor, PR professor, Public relations professor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 29,420 US communications professors, with median pay of $78,580 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 30,030, in May 2012, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 60 from 1915, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for communications professors: Social media and mobile platforms, 2007 to 2020.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.1% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Communications professors: jobs and pay since 1915 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1122

Chicago

Future History. "Communications professors: jobs and pay since 1915." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1122.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_1122, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Communications professors: jobs and pay since 1915}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1122}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
19001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Professor of Elocution / Professor of Oratory / Professor of Public Speaking (pre-discipline era)
Known then as Professor of Public Speaking / Professor of Speech (NAATPS / NATS era)
Known then as Professor of Speech / Speech Instructor (Speech Association of America era)
Known then as Professor of Speech Communication / Journalism Professor / Communications Instructor (Speech Communication Association era)
Known then as Communications Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1122 / NCA era)
Known today as Communications Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1122 / NCA era)
Projected to still be called Communications Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1122 / NCA era)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
29K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$78,580
Est.

≈ $76,565 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1914

On November 28, 1914, seventeen speech teachers walked out of the National Council of Teachers of English meeting in Chicago to form the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (NAATPS). This founding rupture established the principle that teaching people to speak, argue, and communicate in public is a distinct academic discipline, not a subordinate activity within English composition. The seventeen founders were the first professionals to claim the specific identity of "communications teacher" as a postsecondary vocation. NAATPS became NATS (1924), then SAA (1945), then SCA (1970), then NCA (1997); the organization now has over 7,100 members.

Beat · 1947

Wilbur Schramm founded the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1947, the first dedicated academic research center for communication as a social science. Schramm is often credited as the discipline's first self-identified "communication researcher" and his institutional model shaped how doctoral programs in communication were built over the subsequent decades: research in communication became an empirical, social-scientific enterprise alongside (and often in tension with) the older speech pedagogy tradition.

Beat · 1958

Michigan State University founded the first College of Communication in the United States in 1958, establishing communication as a degree-granting academic unit at the college level rather than a department within letters and sciences. This institutional form (a dedicated college of communication or journalism rather than a department) became the model for major research universities and drove significant expansion of communication faculty hiring through the 1960s and 1970s.

Beat · 1980

The US Department of Education classified "communication" as a distinct practical discipline separate from rhetorical studies in 1980, enabling NCES to begin tracking communication degree completions as a distinct field. This reclassification, coinciding with the Speech Communication Association era, enabled the systematic measurement of the discipline's growth. Between 1970-71 and 1980-81, bachelor's degrees in communication and journalism grew from approximately 10,000 to 27,000 per year; the workforce of communications faculty expanded proportionally.

Beat · 1997

The Speech Communication Association renamed itself the National Communication Association in 1997, formalizing the discipline's shift from a speech-centered identity to a broad communication identity encompassing mass media, organizational communication, interpersonal communication, health communication, and emerging digital media. The name change reflected both the research agenda (communication scholars had been publishing extensively on media effects and organizational communication for decades) and the curricular reality: most communication programs by 1997 offered tracks in journalism, PR, broadcast, organizational, and interpersonal communication alongside traditional speech courses.

Beat · 2025

AEJMC's 2025 AI Task Force Report found that 73% of journalism and communication faculty had already revised course learning outcomes to address generative AI, the highest discipline-specific revision rate found in any academic survey of that period. The report identified three curricular imperatives that communications faculty were uniquely positioned to address: teaching synthetic media literacy and deepfake detection as professional competencies; redesigning assessment to prioritize the process of source verification and original reporting over the production of polished text artifacts; and re-grounding media ethics pedagogy in live cases where the ethical obligations of journalism and communication in an AI-generated information environment are still being actively debated.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace communications professors? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+2.1%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-1122 (Communications teachers, postsecondary): 35.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 36.5 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.8 thousand (+2.1%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
57.5%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-1122.00 Communications Teachers, Postsecondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.575, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.325 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.825; GPT-4-rated β 0.425. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for communications professors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereTeach public relations and strategic communication courses (requiring students to develop integrated PR campaigns, media pitches, stakeholder analyses, and communications plans) and training students on industry-standard AI-powered media monitoring and PR tools (CisionOne, Meltwater Mira) as practicum competencies they will use professionally, while building the strategic judgment to evaluate what AI tools surface and what human communication skill still decides.

Teach public relations and strategic communication courses (requiring students to develop integrated PR campaigns, media pitches, stakeholder analyses, and communications plans) and training students on industry-standard AI-powered media monitoring and PR tools (CisionOne, Meltwater Mira) as practicum competencies they will use professionally, while building the strategic judgment to evaluate what AI tools surface and what human communication skill still decides.[8],[9]

Where your edge is

PR curriculum has a built-in structure for integrating AI tools: students are training for professional practice, and the professional practice has already adopted CisionOne and Meltwater as standard tools. Teach students to use them as practitioners do (running sentiment sweeps, building media lists, drafting monitoring reports) while explicitly building the critical layer on top: What does this sentiment score miss? When is an AI-generated pitch worse than a human-written one? What is the strategic judgment that AI media monitoring cannot supply? Syracuse Newhouse PR practicum students now operate CisionOne as a graded deliverable in their senior campaigns course (2025). The PRSA AI survey (Sept 2025) found 76% of practitioners already use AI daily: students who graduate without AI tool fluency are underprepared, but students who graduate without strategic judgment are worse: they'll produce AI-generated noise that erodes their employer's credibility.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare course materials (syllabi, lecture notes, reading lists, case studies, and media analysis exercises) using ChatGPT Edu and NotebookLM to generate first-draft course structures, synthesize secondary literature on communication topics, and build discussion question banks, then applying disciplinary expertise to ensure intellectual coherence, current media contexts, and alignment with professional practice standards set by NCA, AEJMC, and PRSA.

Prepare course materials (syllabi, lecture notes, reading lists, case studies, and media analysis exercises) using ChatGPT Edu and NotebookLM to generate first-draft course structures, synthesize secondary literature on communication topics, and build discussion question banks, then applying disciplinary expertise to ensure intellectual coherence, current media contexts, and alignment with professional practice standards set by NCA, AEJMC, and PRSA.[10]

Where your edge is

Use ChatGPT Edu to generate a first-pass reading list for a media effects survey course: it will produce a reasonable canonical selection of Pew Research data, journalism theory texts, and media law cases. Use NotebookLM to synthesize a stack of several PDFs on organizational communication theory into a thematic lecture starting point. Then invest your disciplinary expertise in the pedagogical architecture: Is the case study selection current enough to feel real to students in 2026? Does the PR campaign analysis unit require students to examine actual AI-generated content they will encounter professionally? Does the media ethics unit engage the live debates in AEJMC rather than settled questions? The NCA (2025) guidance is explicit: communications education's value proposition is preparing students for the AI-saturated media environment they will practice in, curriculum that does not engage AI-current cases is pedagogically incomplete.

AI is sitting alongside you hereTeach journalism reporting and news writing (requiring students to conduct primary-source interviews, verify claims against multiple independent sources, and produce original reported stories) redesigning assignments in 2025–2026 to require explicit documentation of AI-use decisions (who did you interview? what documents did you examine? where did ChatGPT or Perplexity participate and where was human reporting the only option?) as Missouri J-School now mandates.

Teach journalism reporting and news writing (requiring students to conduct primary-source interviews, verify claims against multiple independent sources, and produce original reported stories) redesigning assignments in 2025–2026 to require explicit documentation of AI-use decisions (who did you interview? what documents did you examine? where did ChatGPT or Perplexity participate and where was human reporting the only option?) as Missouri J-School now mandates.[5],[7]

Where your edge is

The AI crisis in journalism education is not primarily about AI-generated prose: it is about AI-generated claims presented as reported facts. A student who uses Perplexity to generate background on a story and then writes that background as if they verified it against primary sources has failed the foundational epistemic obligation of journalism. The AEJMC task force (2025) found this the biggest concern among journalism faculty (not "is the prose plagiarized?" but "did the student talk to any sources?" Redesign reporting assignments to require an interview log with verbatim quotes, a source contact ledger, and a document list as deliverables alongside the story itself) these are genuinely AI-resistant because they require human presence in the world. Missouri J-School's policy of requiring students to document AI-use decisions explicitly in every assignment is the gold standard; JMCE (2025) documents multiple programs replicating it. Use Turnitin as a triage flag, not a verdict, for submissions where no interview log was provided.

Where communications professors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Marketing Managers

Communications faculty (particularly those with strategic communication, advertising, or integrated marketing communication specializations) are well-positioned for Marketing Manager roles as the line between communications, PR, and marketing has blurred in the AI era. The skill overlap is meaningful: comm faculty understand message strategy, audience analysis, media planning, and content strategy; and AI has accelerated the convergence of PR and marketing functions by automating content production and media monitoring at scale. Organizations seeking Marketing Managers who can evaluate AI-generated content, build AI-literate communication teams, and maintain brand authenticity in an AI-saturated environment increasingly value candidates with deep communication theory foundations. The CRI delta is positive because Marketing Managers are somewhat more AI-resilient than the comm faculty average due to stronger revenue-accountability and budget-management dimensions. The main gaps to close are paid media budgeting and performance analytics.

What you'd add
  • · Paid media fundamentals: Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, programmatic display, operational command of the paid channels that comm faculty teach conceptually but rarely operate with real budgets
  • · Marketing attribution and funnel analytics: GA4, HubSpot, Salesforce, connecting communication activities to revenue metrics and demonstrating marketing ROI in terms that CFOs and VPs evaluate
  • · Brand governance in AI-augmented content environments: developing style guides, prompt libraries, and editorial review workflows that calibrate AI content tools to brand standards, the distinctively comm-faculty contribution to corporate marketing AI adoption
  • · Budget forecasting and agency/vendor management: managing a marketing budget across channels, evaluating agency proposals, and negotiating contracts, operational skills that academic budget management only partially approximates
  • · Content operations at marketing scale: managing editorial calendars, content production pipelines (AI-assisted and human), and multi-channel distribution workflows for high-volume brand content programs
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of communications professors changed since 1879?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Elocution manuals and the speaking body (pre-electronic pedagogy)

    The founding technology of the communications teaching profession was the printed elocution manual combined with the professor's own body as demonstration instrument. Texts like Samuel Silas Curry's "The Province of Expression" (1891) and James Rush's earlier "The Philosophy of the Human Voice" (1827) gave instructors a written foundation; the classroom was a space for vocal drills, gesture training, and the performance of set pieces. The blackboard was the only classroom technology. Teaching was entirely experiential: you watched the professor demonstrate a rhetorical figure, you practiced it, you were critiqued. Assessment was public recitation. The professor's primary qualification was mastery of the performing arts of oratory and elocution.

  • Radio broadcasting and the first mass media lab (KDKA 1920 through early TV era)

    Commercial radio broadcasting launched with KDKA Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920, and within a decade universities with communication programs were running on-campus broadcast studios for teaching purposes. The University of Wisconsin's WHA Radio (1917, licensed 1922) was among the first. For communications faculty, radio introduced a genuinely new pedagogical object: students had to learn not just to speak persuasively in person but to perform for an invisible, distributed audience, projecting personality and information through a microphone. The Wisconsin faculty (whose Department of Public Speaking became the Department of Speech in 1920) were among the first to integrate broadcast media into a speech curriculum. By the late 1940s, with television beginning its commercial expansion, communications programs were adding broadcast production to their course offerings and confronting the question of what it meant to teach visual media alongside oral performance.

  • Social science research methods and the "four founders" model (Lazarsfeld, Lewin, Hovland, Lasswell)

    The institutionalization of communication as an empirical social science was driven by four scholars whose wartime work transformed how the discipline understood itself. Paul Lazarsfeld (Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia, 1944), Kurt Lewin (group dynamics), Carl Hovland (persuasion research), and Harold Lasswell (political communication) collectively introduced survey research, content analysis, and experimental methodology into communication departments alongside the older speech pedagogy tradition. Wilbur Schramm founded the Institute for Communications Research at Illinois in 1947, the model for subsequent academic research centers. For communications faculty, this era introduced a profound identity division: were they training practitioners (speech teachers, journalists, broadcasters) or conducting social scientific research? The departmental name changes of the era (from "Speech" toward "Speech Communication" or "Journalism and Communication") reflected this ambivalence. Faculty hired in this era needed both rhetorical knowledge and social science methods.

  • Video production suites and the journalism lab (professional-grade cameras, editing bays)

    The 1970s broadcast television expansion created massive demand for trained journalists, producers, and PR professionals, and communications programs responded by building professional-grade campus newsrooms and broadcast labs. Facilities with ENG (electronic news gathering) cameras, editing suites, and student-run campus TV stations became the defining capital investment of a communications program's credibility in this era. The Missouri Method, with its student newspaper and later its broadcast station, became the template many programs followed: teach through professional production, not just classroom theory. For faculty, this meant that a research publication record was no longer sufficient preparation for teaching broadcast production courses; the dual-track hiring pattern (research faculty versus industry-professional lecturers) became common in journalism and broadcast programs and has persisted to the present.

  • World Wide Web and digital newsroom tools (Mosaic 1993, online journalism labs, HTML/CMS platforms)

    The introduction of Mosaic in 1993 and the subsequent explosive growth of the commercial web forced communications faculty to add digital media literacy to a curriculum that was already carrying speech, journalism, broadcasting, and public relations. The first "online journalism" courses appeared at major programs in the mid-1990s; by the early 2000s most journalism programs had added a digital reporting track alongside print and broadcast. Content management systems (WordPress launched 2003), blogging, and the collapse of the traditional news business model (accelerated by Craigslist's disruption of newspaper classified advertising from about 2000) created a period of intense curricular pressure and existential debate. The Chronicle of Higher Education covered this era as "the death of the journalism school"; in practice, programs expanded rather than contracted because communication as an undergraduate major grew during the internet era, even as journalism program enrollment fell.

    Effect on the work

    Communication programs experienced divergent enrollment trends in this era: journalism programs saw enrollment declines as students questioned the career prospects in a contracting newspaper industry, while communication studies, PR, and media studies programs grew strongly. Total bachelor's degrees in communication and journalism grew between 1993 and 2010 (NCES).

  • Social media and mobile platforms (Facebook 2004, Twitter 2006, iPhone 2007, Instagram 2010)

    The smartphone and social media era transformed communications pedagogy more comprehensively than any prior technology. Every sub-field of the discipline was affected: journalism faculty added social media reporting and verification to syllabi; PR faculty added social media strategy and crisis communication on digital platforms; speech communication faculty added digital self-presentation and online persuasion; organizational communication faculty added computer-mediated communication theory. Yoodli (AI speech coaching, founded 2021 but reflecting a trend that began with YouTube as a rehearsal tool) emerged from this era. Communications faculty faced the dual challenge of keeping their professional-practice content current (the tools changed every two to three years) while maintaining the theoretical depth that distinguished academic instruction from professional training. The proliferation of communication-adjacent content on YouTube, podcasts, and social media created the first era where students arrived with significant self-taught media production skills, raising the bar for what classroom instruction had to add.

  • Generative AI and synthetic media (ChatGPT Nov 2022, Midjourney 2022, deepfake proliferation)

    The November 2022 public release of ChatGPT marked the beginning of the most disruptive technology transition in the history of communications education because it struck at the discipline's core subject matter: what it means to produce, verify, and evaluate human communication. Generative AI can write news stories, produce press releases, generate persuasive speeches, and create photorealistic images and deepfake video at a quality indistinguishable to untrained audiences. This is not a tool that augments the communications professor's administrative work (though it does that too); it is a technology that makes the object of study, authentic human communication, harder to define, verify, and teach. AEJMC's 2025 survey found that 73% of communications faculty had already revised course learning outcomes, the highest revision rate of any discipline-specific survey in the research base. The NCA published a white paper in 2025 on "Artificial Intelligence and the Communication Discipline" making the case that AI "transforms what it means to communicate authentically." Yoodli AI speech coaching (500,000+ users by 2024-25, deployed at Oregon State, ASU, and Michigan) demonstrated the augmentation path for the speech communication sub-field. Reality Defender's deployment at NBC News and Reuters for deepfake detection established a new professional competency that communications faculty became the primary educators responsible for teaching.

    Effect on the work

    Employment projections for 25-1122 in the BLS 2024-2034 cycle show modest growth (+2.1%), suggesting the AI disruption has not (yet) translated into headcount reductions. The more significant near-term effect has been on the composition and content of the work: faculty spend more time redesigning assessments, revising learning outcomes, and engaging with AI ethics debates, and less time delivering static lecture content.

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Communications Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year

On record since1879
Latest US employment29,420 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$78,580 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.1% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 29 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
191560n/aEst., National Communication Association Researched contextReport
1924910n/aEst., National Communication Association Researched contextReport
19342,000n/aEst., National Communication Association Researched contextReport
1970n/a$11,500Est., AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey… Researched contextReport
1990n/a$38,000Est., AHA Perspectives Researched contextReport
200030,000n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics Researched contextReport
200320,420$49,030BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200420,760$49,800BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200522,320$50,890BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200623,560$53,110BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200723,690$54,720BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200824,360$57,760BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200925,090$58,890BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201028,590$60,300BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201129,610$61,330BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201230,030$62,180BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201329,920$63,570BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201429,470$62,550BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201529,050$63,410BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201628,180$65,640BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201728,770$66,510BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201829,100$68,910BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201929,120$70,630BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202028,430$71,030BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202127,330$77,560BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202227,350$76,250BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202328,520$79,910BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202429,260$77,800BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202529,420$78,580BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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