If you can articulate your ideas, you can succeed. No matter what career challenges lie ahead of you, the skills provided by a degree in English—open-ended problem solving, rhetorical analysis and synthetic writing—are extremely powerful. Ultimately, it is very difficult to learn these skills after graduation, and thus students who major in English are prepared to develop professional careers in law, publishing, communication, marketing, public relations, journalism, broadcasting, education, public administration, and business, as well as creative and technical writing.
Career Services offers free services for all CU Boulder degree-seeking students, and alumni up to one year after graduation, to help students discover who they are, what they want to do, and how to get there. They are the bridge between academics and the world of work by discussing major and career exploration, internship or job searching, and graduate school preparation.
According to the 2019-20 College Salary Report by PayScale Human Capital:
- The median salary for someone with a bachelor’s degree in English Language & Literatures and 0-5 years of experience is $57,000.
- The median salary for someone with a bachelor’s degree in English Language & Literatures and 10-plus years of experience is $71,300.

The estimated median salaries,
as reported on Tableau, for English graduates for 1 to 5, 6 to 10, and over 11 years out from school.
At CU Boulder, English graduates earn more than the nationwide average of comparable majors as reported by PayScale. CU Boulder alumni in this discipline earn an estimated annual salary of $82,819 based on a pool of 2317 alumni who graduated between 1989 and 2018. This amount, however, is lower than the average for all CU Boulder graduates with a bachelor's degree, according to a survey by Esmi Alumni Insight of 25,000 alumni who graduated during that same stretch.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 2016-2026 job growth for writing jobs will be 8 percent, same as the projected average job growth, and job growth for elementary-school teachers will be 7 percent, about the same as the projected average job growth for the period. Jobs in journalism are expected to decline by 10 percent, according to the bureau.