What Apparel and Textiles Graduates Earn

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

For Apparel and Textiles, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $44,580 one year after graduation, $58,647 at four years, $64,787 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 3,108 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

Earnings in this field climb $20,207 between the first and fifth year, a 45% 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 $44,580 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $42,850, and graduates who did not earn $50,640, a gap of $7,790. 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, Apparel and Textiles ranks 1 of 5 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $53,457. Its closest sibling is Family and Consumer Economics and Related Studies at $54,107, below this field's $64,787. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Apparel and Textiles stands number 97 by five-year earnings and number 97 by first-year earnings, and number 96 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 1 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $20,755 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Apparel and Textiles, pooled from 42 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $44,580 that balance is 47% of a year's gross pay, roughly 5.6 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $236 a month and $7,551 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

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 Apparel and Textiles among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by University of Delaware at $80,526, against a national field median of $64,787.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $80,526 as a market fact before reading it as a quality verdict. Costs for the same programs are checkable in the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 14.3% of the 3,108 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 $80,526 sits 24% above the national field median of $64,787. Its median debt, $27,000, runs above the field median of $20,755, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.