Graduates earn a median $35,518 two years after finishing, more than 7% of master's majors. Measured across 188 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 | New York University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $63,005 | not published | 31 |
| 2 | California State University-Sacramento cost & debt at this university → | not published | $56,415 | not published | 6 |
| 3 | Saint Louis University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $43,240 | not published | 4 |
| 4 | University of Wisconsin-Madison cost & debt at this university → | not published | $41,025 | not published | 12 |
| 5 | University of Louisville cost & debt at this university → | not published | $38,289 | not published | 4 |
| 6 | New Mexico State University-Main Campus cost & debt at this university → | not published | $36,848 | not published | 18 |
| 7 | Middlebury College cost & debt at this university → | $45,813 | $35,518 | $39,966 | 71 |
| 8 | University of Arizona cost & debt at this university → | not published | $31,839 | not published | 13 |
| 9 | The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley cost & debt at this university → | not published | $15,552 | not published | 17 |
Two medians are worth separating. $35,518 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $38,289 is what the typical programme reports, counting a class of twenty the same as a class of two thousand. The weighted figure is lower here, which means the larger programmes in this field pay less than the small 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 Romance Languages sits below the middle by $17,319.
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.