Graduates earn a median $52,107 two years after finishing, more than 36% of master's majors. Measured across 152 US programmes by the Department of Education — real graduate pay, not survey answers.
It pays around the middle. What you earn will depend more on where you study and what you do with it than on the subject label.
| # | University | 1 yr out | 2 yrs out | 3 yrs out | Graduates/yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Georgetown University | not published | $57,318 | not published | 40 |
| 2 | Middlebury College cost & debt at this university → | $57,928 | $52,941 | $57,550 | — |
| 3 | Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey cost & debt at this university → | $57,928 | $52,941 | $57,550 | 68 |
| 4 | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cost & debt at this university → | not published | $52,107 | not published | 18 |
| 5 | University of Massachusetts-Boston cost & debt at this university → | $45,440 | $48,041 | $46,819 | 40 |
| 6 | Teachers College at Columbia University | not published | $47,260 | not published | 17 |
| 7 | Kent State University at Kent | $42,818 | $39,909 | $42,462 | 22 |
| 8 | University of Colorado Boulder cost & debt at this university → | not published | $28,236 | $39,612 | 12 |
| 9 | University of South Florida cost & debt at this university → | not published | $24,188 | not published | 8 |
Two medians are worth separating. $52,107 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $48,041 is what the typical programme reports, counting a class of twenty the same as a class of two thousand. The weighted figure is higher here, which means the larger programmes in this field are the better-paying ones.
It is the median of what real graduates of this exact major earned, taken from tax records two years after they completed. It is not a starting salary, not an average of job adverts, and not a projection. The median master's major in this dataset reports $52,837, so Linguistic, Comparative sits below the middle by $730.
Two years is early in a career. Fields with long training pipelines — medicine, law, research — look weaker at this point than they will at ten, while trades and applied technical fields peak sooner. Read a low figure in a long-pipeline subject as "slow start", not "bad degree".
There is no debt figure here on purpose. The Department of Education publishes earnings by field of study but not borrowing, so nobody can honestly tell you the debt of a specific major. Debt is published per institution — that is where our university cost pages carry it.
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Classified by the Department of Education as Linguistic, Comparative, and Related Language Studies and Services (CIP 1601). Source: US Department of Education College Scorecard, field-of-study earnings (median earnings of graduates who received federal financial aid, measured 1–3 years after completion). Figures are per major and credential level, pooled across US programmes. Information only, not financial advice.