Graduates earn a median $35,701 two years after finishing, more than 6% of master's majors. Measured across 292 US programmes by the Department of Education — real graduate pay, not survey answers.
On earnings alone this is among the lowest-paying majors at this level. That does not make it a bad subject, but it does make the debt you take on for it matter more.
| # | University | 1 yr out | 2 yrs out | 3 yrs out | Graduates/yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Washington-Bothell Campus | $80,433 | $67,164 | $81,121 | 9 |
| 2 | University of Washington-Seattle Campus | $80,433 | $67,164 | $81,121 | 10 |
| 3 | Arcadia University | not published | $62,209 | not published | 24 |
| 4 | Carnegie Mellon University cost & debt at this university → | $49,841 | $57,318 | not published | 20 |
| 5 | George Mason University cost & debt at this university → | $45,299 | $54,254 | not published | 19 |
| 6 | Clemson University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $54,035 | $63,884 | — |
| 7 | Texas Tech University cost & debt at this university → | $62,244 | $52,107 | not published | 16 |
| 8 | Metropolitan State University cost & debt at this university → | $48,059 | $52,107 | not published | 6 |
| 9 | The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley cost & debt at this university → | not published | $50,856 | not published | 13 |
| 10 | Columbia University in the City of New York | $40,027 | $50,856 | $39,122 | 133 |
| 11 | San Francisco State University cost & debt at this university → | $39,666 | $50,231 | $38,615 | 23 |
| 12 | Towson University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $50,105 | $48,782 | 9 |
Two medians are worth separating. $35,701 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $35,060 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 Rhetoric and Composition & Writing Studies sits below the middle by $17,136.
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 Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies (CIP 2313). 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.