Field-of-Study Earnings: Why Your Major Moves the Numbers
The campus average is a blend
A college's institution-level earnings median mixes engineers with artists, nurses with historians, and students who left for graduate school with students who went straight to work. Two colleges with identical teaching quality can post very different medians purely because their major mixes differ, and one college can contain programmes whose typical earnings differ by a factor of two or three. The College Scorecard field-of-study file — built on the federal CIP classification of programmes — exists to unblend that average, reporting earnings and debt programme by programme, and our field pages and profile highlights are built from it.
What the field file reports
For each programme — a field at a stated credential level at a named college — the file reports graduate counts and median earnings at defined points after completion, together with median debt measures for that programme's students. On this site we use bachelor's programmes, earnings at the four-year measurement point, and the programme debt median, and we say so on every field page. Where programmes are small, figures are privacy-suppressed to protect individuals, and a suppressed value appears here as an absence with an explanation, never as an estimate dressed up as data. The suppression pattern itself is informative: it clusters in small, new and niche programmes.
Reading a field page
Start with the median programme: half of reporting programmes in the field sit above it, half below, which anchors expectations before any famous college distorts them. Then read the spread — the distance between the middle half of programmes — because a wide spread means your college choice inside the field matters enormously, while a narrow one means the field's labour market dominates. Then use the top-colleges table as a pairing exercise, earnings against debt for the same programme, filtered to programmes with enough graduates counted to be meaningful. A top table is a shortlist generator, and like every shortlist on this site it ends by sending you to fuller profiles, not by declaring a winner.
The completion gap — stated, not filled
The field file does not publish completion rates by programme, and this site does not pretend otherwise. That is a genuine gap, because finishing probability is part of a programme's real outcome, and students do switch and leave programmes unevenly. The honest procedure is to pair programme earnings and debt with the institution-level completion rate from the college's profile — the environment you will actually study in — and to ask colleges directly for programme-level retention and completion when you visit. Any source presenting an exact major-specific completion rate from federal data is presenting something the federal data does not contain, and that should discount everything else it tells you.
Choosing with the field data, not by it
Let field figures veto fantasies and price risk, not pick your life. They can tell you that a field's typical debt is heavy relative to its typical earnings, that a particular college's programme is an outlier worth visiting, or that graduate school — invisible in early earnings because enrolled students are excluded — is the normal route and should be priced into the plan. They cannot weigh interest, aptitude or the difference between the median graduate and you. The students who use this data best treat it as the financial and evidentiary frame around a choice they make for educational reasons — and they check the frame before they sign, not after.
Further reading: return to the Learn index, apply these definitions in the college profiles and field pages, or read the full methodology for sources, files and suppression rules.
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.