5W Public Relations released a 36-page free research report this week on the U.S. public relations and marketing education landscape — the first study of its kind from a major U.S. agency.
The report, Studying PR and Marketing at U.S. Universities, profiles the 10 Tier 1 undergraduate PR programs in the U.S., maps entry-level salary ranges across 11 cities, and grades the AI integration status of every top program. The headline finding: most top PR programs are not yet teaching AI as a core part of the curriculum, despite the agency industry now treating AI fluency as a baseline expectation for new hires.
Why this matters for agencies
Talent acquisition has gotten harder, not easier, in 2025 and 2026. Latte’s 2026 PRTalent Trends Report documented a roughly 9% decline in account coordinator roles year over year. CNBC and Revelio Labs put the broader entry-level decline at about 35% since January 2023. The candidates available to hire are not the candidates agencies got used to recruiting between 2010 and 2020.
The 5W report is, in effect, a hiring map. It tells agency talent leaders which schools have updated their curricula, which haven’t, what entry-level hires are currently being paid, and what skills the strongest candidates arrive with. For an agency that recruits at scale, that is operationally useful information.
It is also useful as a recruiting and reputation tool. The agencies that have publishedgenuine research over the past decade — Edelman’s Trust Barometer, Weber Shandwick’s various studies, MSL’s content reports — built recruiting and prospecting advantages from doing so. 5W is now in that category, with one important difference: this report is targeted at students and prospective hires directly, not at brand-side decision-makers.
That is a strategic move worth watching. The agencies that get associated in students’ minds with practical, useful, freely shared information are the agencies that recruiting becomes easier for. 5W has now positioned itself as that kind of agency.
What the report covers
Nine illustrated charts in the report visualize:
- BLS employment and wage data for PR specialists and managers
- Wage distribution across percentiles
- Annual job opening projections through 2034
- The Red-Yellow-Green AI framework now used at most major U.S. universities
- AI course status across the Tier 1 programs
- Entry-level salary ranges in 11 U.S. cities
- What hiring managers actually weigh at the entry level
The report includes specific, named program recommendations — BostonUniversity, Columbia SPS, NYU SPS, and the University of Denver are the four programs the report identifies as having the strongest AI integration. Most other Tier 1 undergraduate programs are described as having partial integration. A few are described as underbuilt.
That kind of plain-spoken evaluation is rare in agency-published research, which tends toward corporate hedging. The 5W report’s willingness to grade programs by name is, by itself, the kind of editorial choice that drives sharing.
Bottom line for agency leaders
Read the report. Pass it to your recruiting team. Use it the next time you’re evaluating a candidate’s background — the school context the report provides is significantly more useful than what you’ll find on Niche.com or U.S. News rankings.
And, if you’re an agency thinking about your own thought-leadership strategy, watch what 5W did here. Free, useful, specific, named. That is the standard now.
The full report is available at 5wpr.com/research/pr-marketing-education.
