What Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical/Space Engineering Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

The three rows below are the whole earnings story Scorecard can tell about Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical/Space Engineering: $78,794, then $95,552, then $101,725. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 62 programs at year one and 60 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

Five years out, the median graduate earns $101,725, which is $22,931 more than the year-one median of $78,794 (29% growth). Set against the median field overall ($45,010 at year one, $65,763 at year five), this field starts above the pack and ends above it.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $78,794 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $78,601, and graduates who did not earn $78,838, a gap of $237. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical/Space Engineering ranks 7 of 17 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $97,669. Its closest sibling is Chemical Engineering at $102,595, above this field's $101,725. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical/Space Engineering stands number 10 by five-year earnings and number 11 by first-year earnings, and number 140 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 130 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical/Space Engineering graduate owe? $22,750, the graduate-weighted median over 62 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 29%, or 3.5 months of gross pay at the $78,794 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $259 a month with $8,276 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $101,725 five-year figure. The table ranks the reporting programs by their five-year median, keeping only programs with at least 30 graduates in that count so a tiny cohort cannot top the list by luck. University of Southern California leads it at $139,259.

Treat the top of this table as a research list, not a ranking to enroll by: medians reflect local labor markets and student mix as much as teaching. The honest comparison pairs each program's earnings here with its net price from the net price estimator and its four-year total from the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 5.3% of the 4,218 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $139,259 sits 37% above the national field median of $101,725. Its median debt, $19,125, runs below the field median of $22,750, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.