Clemson University: Earnings, Debt and Completion

By the College Outcomes Data Editorial Team  ·  Last updated: October 2026

Clemson University is a public institution in Clemson, SC, enrolling about 23,300 undergraduate students in the College Scorecard release used for this page. Its graduates' median earnings ten years after entry are $79,064, its median graduate debt is $19,500, and its completion rate is 87.5%. Those three figures are published together on this page on purpose: earnings alone flatter colleges whose students borrow heavily or never finish, while debt and completion show what the earnings cost and how many students actually reached the credential those earnings assume.

The outcomes table

*Median across the 1,495 predominantly bachelor's-degree institutions in this Scorecard release that report earnings, graduate debt and completion together. Calculated by College Outcomes Data from the source file.

Earnings in context

At $79,064, the ten-year median sits $19,980 above that cross-institution median of $59,084, placing Clemson University around the 87th percentile of reporting bachelor's-level institutions on this measure. Read that position carefully. The earnings cohort is made up of students who received federal financial aid, began at this institution years ago, and were working and not enrolled when measured; it does not include students who paid without federal aid, and it reflects the majors, region and economy those particular students entered. A high median can reflect strong teaching and advising, a selective intake, an expensive city's wages, a heavy engineering mix — usually a blend of all four — so the field-of-study figures below matter as much as the headline.

Debt: what the earnings cost to reach

Median graduate debt of $19,500 means half of graduates who borrowed left with less than that and half with more; students who finished without borrowing are not in a debt median at all. Set against earnings, the debt-to-earnings figure above is 0.25 — roughly 25 cents of graduate debt for every dollar of median annual earnings at the ten-year point. That is a screening ratio, not a repayment forecast: actual payments depend on interest, repayment plan and income over time. Still, it is the fastest honest way to compare two colleges whose earnings look similar but whose borrowing does not. The three-year repayment rate is 77.6%: the share of borrowers who were making progress on their loans three years after entering repayment.

Completion and admission

The completion rate of 87.5% is the share of the entering cohort that finished a credential within 150 percent of the normal programme length — for a bachelor's degree, within six years. It sits 31.9 percentage points above the 55.7% median for comparable institutions. Completion is the outcome students control least attention for and feel most: a college's earnings figures describe its completers' world, and a student who does not finish usually carries debt without the degree premium that makes it manageable. Its admission rate in this release is 38.3%, which describes how selective entry was for a recent applicant pool. The average SAT score of entering students reported in the file is 1,353. Selectivity and completion often move together because both reflect incoming preparation, so neither should be read as a pure measure of teaching quality.

Cost and net price

The published cost of attendance is $35,250 a year, and the average net price — what students actually pay after grant aid — is $22,032 a year. Published in-state tuition and fees are $15,854, with out-of-state tuition and fees of $42,378. Sticker price, net price and debt are three different lenses on the same decision: the sticker price is the published figure, net price is what a typical aided student actually pays per year, and graduate debt is the residue after four or more years of those net prices plus living costs and any aid changes. Comparing net price here with the debt figure above is a useful consistency check — where net price is low but debt is high, living costs, time-to-degree or aid renewal terms are usually doing the work, and those are exactly the questions to put to the financial aid office.

Field-of-study highlights at Clemson University

The field-of-study file lets you see past the campus average. The programs below are the bachelor's programs at Clemson University with the largest recent graduate counts in that file that report both earnings and debt. Earnings here are the median reported at the four-year measurement point in the field-of-study file, and debt is the median debt for that program, so the two columns describe the same program rather than the institution as a whole. A campus can look average overall while one program is exceptional — or the reverse — which is exactly why program-level figures belong next to the headline number.

Program counts are small at many colleges, and small programs are the ones most often privacy-suppressed in the source file. Treat a program figure based on a modest count as a signal to investigate further, not as a precise ranking. Where a program you care about does not appear, the likeliest explanations are that it is new, small, or suppressed — not that its outcomes are zero.

How to use these figures

Start with completion, because it gates everything else, then put debt next to earnings for the specific programme you would actually study, and finally test cost against your family's real budget using the college's own net price calculator. If Clemson University remains on your list after that pass, the figures here have done their job: not choosing for you, but removing the colleges — and the sales claims — that the federal data does not support. Figures change with each Scorecard release, cohorts age, and programmes open and close, so treat this page as a dated snapshot of a defined cohort rather than a live promise.

Note on this data: Figures on this page come from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard release retrieved in October 2026. Earnings cover students who received federal financial aid and were working and not enrolled at the measurement point; they are medians for a defined past cohort, not a promise of what any individual graduate will earn. Check the college and the Scorecard for the most current figures before you decide.