What Bible/Biblical Studies Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Bible/Biblical Studies pays $37,000 at the first measured horizon and $47,064 at the last, and those two medians rest on 1,576 and 2,152 graduates counted respectively. The headline figures weight each reporting program by its graduates counted, so the 400-graduate program moves the national number more than the 12-graduate one; the unweighted column beside it shows the middle program, plain and simple.

Earnings in this field climb $10,064 between the first and fifth year, a 27% 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 $37,000 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $36,859, and graduates who did not earn $44,722, a gap of $7,863. 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, Bible/Biblical Studies ranks 2 of 3 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $47,064. Its closest sibling is Theological and Ministerial Studies at $48,871, above this field's $47,064. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Bible/Biblical Studies stands number 174 by five-year earnings and number 159 by first-year earnings, and number 142 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 32 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $23,059 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 25 programs reporting debt. That is 62% of the first-year median earnings, or about 7.5 months of gross pay at $37,000 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $262 a month and interest adds $8,389 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 $47,064 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. Regent University leads it at $55,314.

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 26.1% of the 2,152 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 $55,314 sits 18% above the national field median of $47,064. Its median debt, $30,334, runs above the field median of $23,059, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.