Best Communications & Media Programs with Swim Teams
Journalism, broadcast, and film run on industry time. Games start on weekends, news breaks at night, and production calls land at 6 a.m. when you are already in the pool. The schedule that a communications degree trains you for is the same schedule that a competitive swim season makes impossible to meet. The list below rewards schools whose career offices have worked around that problem before, and it rewards earnings outcomes across every industry a comms degree feeds into, not only media. Georgia Tech lands at second, ahead of Cornell, Northwestern, USC, and Michigan.
Two SEC swimmers who built their careers around this major, Elizabeth Beisel at Florida and Rowdy Gaines at Auburn, are further down the page.
353 schools ranked by academic outcomes and selectivity. Powered by College Scorecard data.
Two swimmers who chose this path
Elizabeth Beisel swam at Florida from 2011 to 2014 as a three-time Olympian and a two-time Olympic medalist, including silver in the 2012 400-meter individual medley and bronze in the 200-meter backstroke. She won nine SEC individual championships and was the 2012 SEC Female Swimmer of the Year. A telecommunications major inside Florida's College of Journalism and Communications, Beisel earned Academic All-America First-Team honors every year she was eligible and graduated with a 3.9 GPA. Florida sits at twentieth on this list. The telecommunications track at Florida is a broadcast and media production program.
Rowdy Gaines won three Olympic gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, including the 100-meter freestyle and the two relays, having held the world record in the 100 free on his way there. He swam at Auburn and graduated in 1981 with a degree in communications. Auburn sits at forty-fourth on this list. The communications degree turned into nine Olympic Games as the lead swimming broadcaster for NBC, a second career that has already run longer than his competitive career did. The academic choice in 1981 was not headline-worthy. The career that followed it is.
How the divisions compare
Division I
Forty-three of the top fifty are Division I, and the ranking leans harder on P4 conferences than any other page on this site. Penn leads at first, Georgia Tech second, Cornell third. Northwestern, USC, and Michigan anchor the Big Ten presence at fifth, ninth, and tenth. Northeastern of the CAA at fourth, Boston University of the Patriot at seventh, and California of the ACC at eighth round out the D1 top ten. The named communications schools cluster hard: Penn's Annenberg, Northwestern's Medill, USC's Annenberg and School of Cinematic Arts, BU's College of Communication, and Michigan's Department of Communication and Media all appear inside the top ten.
Division II
Two Division II programs crack the top fifty, Tampa at forty-ninth and William Jewell at fiftieth. That is more D2 representation than any other page on this site, but both schools rank on earnings outliers rather than established communications reputations. For a swimmer whose times fit D2 and whose target is a comms career, the local media market the school sits near and the career office's placement history matter more than a national rank at this level.
Division III
Only five Division III programs land in the top fifty: NYU at sixth, Washington & Lee at fourteenth, RPI at nineteenth, Denison at twenty-second, and Vassar at thirty-fifth. That is the lowest D3 share of any page on this site. The Communications & Media category rewards home-school brand and proximity to a large media market, both of which favor larger D1 programs. NYU sits at sixth because it sits in Manhattan and funnels graduates directly into the largest media market in the country. For a swimmer whose times fit D3, the comms career is still available, but this ranking will be less useful in comparing options than it is for recruits in other majors.
Frequently asked questions
Can you realistically swim and study communications?
Yes, and the coursework itself is not the hard part. Communications classes are writing-heavy but flexible on timing, and professors have taught student-athletes on SEC-scale travel schedules for decades. The specific conflict is production work, required internships, and media-job recruiting, all of which run on industry hours: evenings, weekends, and early mornings. Swimmers who succeed in this major tend to front-load production lab credits in the first two years and concentrate their industry-schedule-heavy work in the summer after sophomore year and the weeks after the championship season ends.
What is the specific scheduling conflict between communications and swimming?
Production labs, where broadcast and film majors actually learn the craft, run in multi-hour evening blocks that compete directly with practice. News internships expect shifts at 4 a.m. or 11 p.m., the two ends of a broadcast news day, both of which collide with morning or recovery swims. Media internships on the sports side expect weekend work because games are on weekends. The NCAA season runs from fall start to conference championships in late February or early March, the same window in which spring recruiting for summer internships is happening.
Which programs handle that conflict best and why?
Penn's Annenberg School, Northwestern's Medill, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, USC's Annenberg, and BU's College of Communication all sit inside the top ten of this ranking. Each has a named communications or journalism school with decades of industry placement history. Georgia Tech, at second, does not have a named comms school but leads the top ten on earnings at $58,673 median, because its communications graduates enter tech-adjacent industries. The schools that handle the swim-and-comms conflict best are the five named-school programs above, each of which runs athletic academic coordination that has placed student-athletes into media internships for decades.
Is D3 a better fit for swimmers in communications?
Not especially, for this major. Only five D3 programs land in the top fifty, the lowest share of any page on this site, because comms outcomes are driven by media-market proximity and named-school brand, both of which favor larger D1 programs. NYU at sixth is the clear exception: a D3 program sitting inside Manhattan's media market with a pipeline into every major network and agency. The rest of the D3 field on this page ranks well but not exceptionally, and a swimmer prioritizing a communications career should probably weight the D1 options higher.
What does admission actually require at the top programs?
Admission at the top of this list is mostly to the school, not to a specific comms department. Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, and NYU admit applicants at rates between 4% and 9%, and the comms major at each of these schools is declared after matriculation. The academic profile that clears the bar is a high school transcript with strong grades in English, social studies, and one year of a media or journalism elective if the school offers it. Portfolios help, especially writing samples and any documented broadcast, video, or podcast work. Recruit status gets a swimmer into the school. It does not lower the bar for the major's selective internships or broadcast track auditions.
What do people who swam and studied communications say about it?
Elizabeth Beisel majored in telecommunications at Florida, earned Academic All-America First-Team honors every year she was eligible, and graduated with a 3.9 GPA. Rowdy Gaines graduated from Auburn four decades earlier with a communications degree. He went from three Olympic golds at Los Angeles 1984 to a broadcast career at NBC that has now spanned nine Olympic Games. Neither of them landed in this career by accident. Both of them studied for it.