What Applied Mathematics Graduates Earn

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

For Applied Mathematics, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $63,684 one year after graduation, $95,719 at four years, $99,039 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 1,959 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

From $63,684 in the first year to $99,039 in the fifth, earnings grow 56% ($35,355). For scale, the median bachelor's field in the Scorecard file grows from $45,010 to $65,763 over the same span, so this field's early-career slope is steeper than typical.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Applied Mathematics are $65,913 (received Pell) and $72,250 (did not), $6,337 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.

Inside its own CIP family, Applied Mathematics ranks 1 of 3 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $98,009. Its closest sibling is Statistics at $98,009, below this field's $99,039. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Applied Mathematics stands number 15 by five-year earnings and number 44 by first-year earnings, and number 82 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 67 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $20,454 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 37 programs reporting debt. That is 32% of the first-year median earnings, or about 3.9 months of gross pay at $63,684 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $232 a month and interest adds $7,441 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 Applied Mathematics among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Brown University at $163,649, against a national field median of $99,039.

A program median describes that program's own graduates in that program's own labor market; Brown University at $163,649 is evidence about a place and a mix of students, not a wage offer. Put the same programs' prices next to these figures with the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator before ranking anything.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 13.8% of the 1,959 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 $163,649 sits 65% above the national field median of $99,039. Its median debt, $8,125, runs below the field median of $20,454, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.