What Business Administration, Management and Operations 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 Business Administration, Management and Operations: $58,346, then $68,235, then $70,460. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 1,232 programs at year one and 1,221 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

From $58,346 in the first year to $70,460 in the fifth, earnings grow 21% ($12,114). 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 gentler than typical.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Business Administration, Management and Operations are $57,755 (received Pell) and $62,044 (did not), $4,289 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, Business Administration, Management and Operations ranks 14 of 19 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $78,466. Its closest sibling is Human Resources Management and Services at $72,054, above this field's $70,460. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Business Administration, Management and Operations stands number 80 by five-year earnings and number 56 by first-year earnings, and number 160 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

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $24,338 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Business Administration, Management and Operations, pooled from 1,113 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $58,346 that balance is 42% of a year's gross pay, roughly 5.0 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $277 a month and $8,854 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $70,460 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. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor leads it at $168,210.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $168,210 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 0.4% of the 287,765 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 $168,210 sits 139% above the national field median of $70,460. Its median debt, $19,500, runs below the field median of $24,338, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.