Did you want a job after graduating from the University of Missouri School of Journalism? Yeah, we did too. Sadly, we have some news that doesn’t bode well for us. The journalism school has the lowest post-graduation placement rate of any academic college at the University of Missouri. And you thought the starting salaries for J-Schoolers were bad!

In Fall 2009 and Spring and Summer 2010, 4,507 people graduated from the University of Missouri. Of the 2,777 MU graduates who replied to the Vice Provost’s Destination Study, 68 percent of them are now employed or enrolled in a continuing education program (you can see the full results of MU’s Destination Study here). The school with the highest placement rate is Mizzou’s (much smaller) School of Social Work with 100 percent of graduates now in jobs or in graduate programs. Sadly, the school with the lowest placement rate is our very own journalism school, at a mere 53 percent.

We already reported where J-School graduates ended up around the country, but we didn’t know until now if they actually had jobs out there.

Within the journalism school, there’s a big difference in job placement rates, even though the starting salaries were pretty bad across the board. As you can see below, Print & Digital News has the highest placement rate with 80 percent. The lowest is Photojournalism, with a 29 percent placement rate. “Placement” can mean several things: getting a job in your field, getting a job out of your field or continuing your education.

But as Photojournalism senior Patrick Fallon pointed out, more Photojournalism students are doing freelance work, which they might not consider a “job” according to the University’s definition. This 29 percent number for Photo-J could be an artificially deflated figure, based on a poorly-worded question.

Another possible explanation for why so few J-Schoolers can find jobs: people like this.

Stay tuned as we do the reporting to find out why the journalism school has such a lackluster placement rate and why there is such a discrepancy in placement rates among the emphasis areas.

Update: Eighteen percent of J-Schoolers who responded to the survey indicated they were enrolled in “continuing education.” Forty-seven percent of respondents were “seeking employment,” and 33 percent were employed. Because of rounding, those figures do not add up exactly to 100 percent.