What Audiovisual Communications Technologies/Technicians Graduates Earn

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

For Audiovisual Communications Technologies/Technicians, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $36,952 one year after graduation, $44,222 at four years, $47,556 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 1,475 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 $10,604 between the first and fifth year, a 29% 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.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Audiovisual Communications Technologies/Technicians post a median of $37,789, non-recipients $35,612. That $2,177 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, Audiovisual Communications Technologies/Technicians ranks 1 of 2 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $47,454. Its closest sibling is Graphic Communications at $47,454, below this field's $47,556. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Audiovisual Communications Technologies/Technicians stands number 172 by five-year earnings and number 161 by first-year earnings, and number 178 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 6 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Audiovisual Communications Technologies/Technicians graduate owe? $36,279, the graduate-weighted median over 15 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 98%, or 11.8 months of gross pay at the $36,952 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $412 a month with $13,198 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

One field, many markets: the five-year median for Audiovisual Communications Technologies/Technicians is $47,556 nationally, yet the strongest programs below run far ahead of it. The ranking keeps a 30-graduate floor under every entry, and Bowie State University heads the list at $62,334.

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 23.0% of the 1,475 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 $62,334 sits 31% above the national field median of $47,556. Its median debt, $20,654, runs below the field median of $36,279, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.