My sister got a couple of bachelor’s degrees in German and French. She also took Spanish and Norwegian for fun.
But could never make money using them.
She did get a job in France a few summers teaching English to French kids at a summer camp. Didn’t pay much at all, but with food and board and no transportation costs she did okay.
Now she’s a substitute teacher, mostly with language classes, but it’s not steady and it’s not secure.
I’d like to point out that a lot of competition for jobs actually doing interpreting or translation is going to come from people who have the language as a first or second native language. One of my son’s friends has a Latin American father and a Indoesian mother and is being raised in Minnesota - so he has three languages at seven. I’m amazed how many Russian immigrants I run into - and one generation removed they generally have two native languages.
Its hard (but not impossible) to pick up the level of fluency as an adult.
(With an interest in Engineering, but no interest in the heavy lifting, has he thought about Operations Management? - business has a lot more math in it than a lot of people admit - add a minor in German and Russian…(or better yet, Chinese)… )
If he goes into IT, there’s work for folks in localization. A lot of it is your typical developer work, but there’s also work for fact-checking and working with folks in the target locale.
For example, we localize a lot of our stuff for Japan, so we have native Japanese or fluent Japanese speakers to help out with the stuff that English-only employees may have difficulty managing.
I’ve got a B.A. in Spanish and an M.A. in Russian & East European Studies. I love languages and think they are extremely handy for all sorts of things, and that everyone should learn at least one, and should study abroad in college if at all possible.
However, I am going to recommend that it be done in conjunction with some other skillset, whether technical or liberal-artsy. Most translators need to have a solid knowledge of the subject matter in which they do the bulk of their work in order to be solidly marketable. Do I use my language skills at work? Hell yeah (especially today, when my boss went on a Spanish-language radio talk show and did a call-in Q&A on immigration issues, and referred all callers to me). Is it the primary substance of what I do? Not most of the time, and the same is true of many, if not most careers where foreign-language skills come in handy.
Well, that’s exactly what I took in university, and I’ve done OK by it, having worked as a professional translator for more than a decade. However, judging by my fellow students, chances are he won’t make a career out of languages by themselves.
Even if he doesn’t become a translator, the knowledge of languages will open up a whole range of other cultural and career opportunities that he wouldn’t have with English alone. I’d agree with Eva Luna that he should also have at least a minor in something else to go with the foreign languages.
One other thing - unless he’s freakishly talented, he won’t be fluent in both by the time he gets out of a BA program. It’ll take some time living in Germany or Russia, socializing with people and living everyday life in the language, to do that.