Graduates earn a median $32,382 two years after finishing, more than 23% of bachelor's majors. Measured across 877 US programmes by the Department of Education — real graduate pay, not survey answers.
Financially it is a slower start than most majors at this level — worth planning your borrowing around.
| # | University | 1 yr out | 2 yrs out | 3 yrs out | Graduates/yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amherst College cost & debt at this university → | not published | $67,101 | not published | 30 |
| 2 | University of Notre Dame cost & debt at this university → | $37,909 | $54,630 | $61,217 | 74 |
| 3 | Duke University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $52,107 | not published | 21 |
| 4 | Boston College | not published | $52,107 | $49,024 | 9 |
| 5 | Georgetown University | $39,870 | $52,107 | $57,978 | 18 |
| 6 | Hamilton College cost & debt at this university → | $40,658 | $50,439 | not published | 31 |
| 7 | Williams College cost & debt at this university → | not published | $49,644 | not published | 21 |
| 8 | Bucknell University cost & debt at this university → | $45,358 | $49,136 | $60,608 | 32 |
| 9 | Saint Johns University | not published | $48,849 | not published | 2 |
| 10 | Lafayette College cost & debt at this university → | not published | $48,823 | not published | 7 |
| 11 | New Jersey City University cost & debt at this university → | $31,153 | $48,600 | $50,753 | 9 |
| 12 | Villanova University cost & debt at this university → | $34,179 | $48,432 | not published | 29 |
Two medians are worth separating. $32,382 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $31,133 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 bachelor's major in this dataset reports $36,497, so Romance Languages sits below the middle by $4,115.
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 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics (CIP 1609). 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.