What Agricultural Public Services Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Agricultural Public Services pays $46,367 at the first measured horizon and $58,622 at the last, and those two medians rest on 458 and 398 graduates counted respectively. The headline figures weight each reporting program by its graduates counted, so the 400-graduate program moves the national number more than the 12-graduate one; the unweighted column beside it shows the middle program, plain and simple.

Earnings in this field climb $12,255 between the first and fifth year, a 26% rise that trails the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $46,367 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $46,634, and graduates who did not earn $45,790, a gap of $844. 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, Agricultural Public Services ranks 4 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $57,898. Its closest sibling is Animal Sciences at $57,898, below this field's $58,622. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Agricultural Public Services stands number 120 by five-year earnings and number 84 by first-year earnings, and number 3 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 117 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $15,822 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Agricultural Public Services, pooled from 8 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $46,367 that balance is 34% of a year's gross pay, roughly 4.1 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $180 a month and $5,756 in total interest. Your own balance and rate belong in the student loan payoff calculator; the degree-level verdict belongs in the college ROI calculator and the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $58,622 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 Wisconsin-Madison leads it at $67,037.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of University of Wisconsin-Madison's counted graduates earn less than $67,037. Weigh any program here against its own price using the net price estimator and the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 73.4% of the 398 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 $67,037 sits 14% above the national field median of $58,622. Its median debt, $14,186, runs below the field median of $15,822, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.