All of this is wrong, except the bolded.
"How challenging your degree was" goes directly towards labor supply. When it's something like Pharmacology or Engineering, which are difficult, the supply constricts as the difficulty selects for more disciplined, smarter people--who are statistically rarer. Licensing constricts the labor supply farther still. Capital has to offer robust compensation packages to attract anybody to these professions at all. Without paying $120k out of the gate, even in an area with low cost of living, no student would study Pharmacology.
When it's something like a degree in journalism, where it's easy enough that you can be semi-literate and still achieve a BA under certain circumstances, the supply bloats, reducing compensation. Worse for leverage, a BA isn't a hard barrier to entry. Justin Bourne became a journalist by way of submitting opinion pieces to a tabloid blog when he was on IR for an ECHL hockey club. James Mirtle was writing diary entries in his dorm room. As media outlet after media outlet dies due to broken business models and inability to compete with randoms on youtube (which requires no degree at all), demand is likewise reduced.
"Most senior editors you read online" might very well be making six figures, but there are fewer and fewer of them every day, and those which remain are increasingly consolidated in 4 cities, globally (New York, Washington, London, Los Angeles). Senior editors outside of the Anglosphere almost never make anywhere near six figures. If you're under the impression that a Senior editor at a French-language regional in Brittany is making $100k US (to say nothing of an editor in Prague), I don't know what to tell you.
