What East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

Start with the shape of the table: East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics pays $35,335 at the first measured horizon and $57,030 at the last, and those two medians rest on 530 and 719 graduates counted respectively. The headline figures weight each reporting program by its graduates counted, so the 400-graduate program moves the national number more than the 12-graduate one; the unweighted column beside it shows the middle program, plain and simple.

The trajectory is the story here: $35,335 at year one, $51,826 at year four, $57,030 at year five. That is 61% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $21,695 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $31,921 for graduates who received Pell, $38,020 for those who did not. The $6,099 difference tracks institutional mix and starting networks far more than it tracks the credential itself, and it is printed here because a Pell student comparing programs deserves the unblended number.

Inside its own CIP family, East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics ranks 2 of 4 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $56,160. Its closest sibling is Linguistic, Comparative, and Related Language Studies and Services at $56,160, below this field's $57,030. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics stands number 131 by five-year earnings and number 167 by first-year earnings, and number 13 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 118 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 8 programs that report debt for East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, the median graduate owes $18,116. Set beside the $35,335 year-one median, the debt is 51% of first-year gross earnings, about 6.2 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $206 monthly and $6,591 in interest. The student loan payoff calculator replays that schedule with your numbers, and the college ROI calculator weighs the full cost against the earnings table above.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, individual programs post five-year medians far from $57,030 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; University of California-Davis sits first at $69,867.

Treat the top of this table as a research list, not a ranking to enroll by: medians reflect local labor markets and student mix as much as teaching. The honest comparison pairs each program's earnings here with its net price from the net price estimator and its four-year total from the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 28.2% of the 719 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $69,867 sits 23% above the national field median of $57,030. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.