Learn a Language, Get a Raise

Feb. 28, 2008— -- Mastering a foreign language is a tough slog. For the 1.5 million college students hunched over a foreign language textbook, spending hundreds of hours trying to perfect their Spanish or French, their studies are meant to be a promising investment. Increased pay and plum jobs have long been dangled before students as an incentive for bilingualism.

But if American students think they are going to command a much higher salary after graduation because of their language skills, they are in for disappointment.

Spanish, for example, is far and away the most popular foreign-language class in American colleges, but bilingual job seekers earn the smallest wage premium. In 2006, there were roughly 823,000 American students enrolled in Spanish courses--accounting for 52% of all enrollments--according to the Modern Language Association (MLA). But bilingual Spanish speakers earned only a 1.7% wage premium.

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Calculating the exact value of learning a second language has vexed economists. For example, it is difficult to separate the wage increases associated with learning a foreign language from other, closely co-related variables like education and motivation.

Still, some economists have tried. In 2005, Albert Saiz, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elena Zoido, an economist at the consulting group LECG, published a study comparing wage premiums for American college graduates who spoke Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese as a second language.

In their findings, the law of supply and demand prevailed. With its 1.7% wage premium, Spanish was the least valuable, followed by French (2.7%). Knowledge of German, Italian, Russian and Chinese was slightly more valuable, translating into an average 4% income boost.

Those gains are paltry compared with simply staying in school a bit longer. In the same study, Saiz and Zoido found that an extra year of schooling yielded an 8% to 14% wage premium.