What Air Transportation 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 Air Transportation: $64,220, then $90,495, then $99,660. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 68 programs at year one and 56 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

The trajectory is the story here: $64,220 at year one, $90,495 at year four, $99,660 at year five. That is 55% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $35,440 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Air Transportation are $66,866 (received Pell) and $53,739 (did not), $13,127 apart. The split is a reminder that a field median averages over very different starting points; the institution a student picks inside the field moves their personal figure more than the field label does.

Air Transportation is the only field in its two-digit CIP family that cleared this site's publication bar of 10 programs reporting at every horizon, which itself says something about how concentrated the federal earnings data are: whole families of study rest on a handful of reporting programs.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Air Transportation stands number 14 by five-year earnings and number 43 by first-year earnings, and number 84 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 70 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $20,500 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 64 programs reporting debt. That is 32% of the first-year median earnings, or about 3.8 months of gross pay at $64,220 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $233 a month and interest adds $7,458 over the life of the loan. Price your own borrowing with the student loan payoff calculator, and test the whole degree in the college ROI calculator or the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Where a student studies inside this field matters at least as much as the field itself. These five programs post the strongest five-year medians in Air Transportation among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Liberty University at $109,837, against a national field median of $99,660.

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 12.0% of the 6,788 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 $109,837 sits 10% above the national field median of $99,660. Its median debt, $20,500, runs below the field median of $20,500, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.