What Area Studies 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 Area Studies: $42,873, then $58,245, then $67,465. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 54 programs at year one and 74 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: $42,873 at year one, $58,245 at year four, $67,465 at year five. That is 57% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $24,592 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Area Studies post a median of $44,775, non-recipients $40,737. That $4,038 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Inside its own CIP family, Area Studies ranks 1 of 2 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $57,622. Its closest sibling is Ethnic, Cultural Minority, Gender, and Group Studies at $57,622, below this field's $67,465. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Area Studies stands number 86 by five-year earnings and number 117 by first-year earnings, and number 6 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 80 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $16,706 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 39 programs reporting debt. That is 39% of the first-year median earnings, or about 4.7 months of gross pay at $42,873 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $190 a month and interest adds $6,078 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $67,465 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. Emory University leads it at $81,039.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Emory University's counted graduates earn less than $81,039. 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 9.4% of the 2,801 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 $81,039 sits 20% above the national field median of $67,465. Its median debt, $12,000, runs below the field median of $16,706, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.