What Business/Commerce, General Graduates Earn

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

For Business/Commerce, General, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $56,302 one year after graduation, $64,016 at four years, $65,700 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 91,233 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 $56,302 in the first year to $65,700 in the fifth, earnings grow 17% ($9,398). 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.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $56,302 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $53,496, and graduates who did not earn $59,374, a gap of $5,878. 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, Business/Commerce, General ranks 16 of 19 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $78,466. Its closest sibling is Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations at $67,447, above this field's $65,700. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Business/Commerce, General stands number 92 by five-year earnings and number 59 by first-year earnings, and number 180 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 88 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 233 programs that report debt for Business/Commerce, General, the median graduate owes $42,374. Set beside the $56,302 year-one median, the debt is 75% of first-year gross earnings, about 9.0 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $482 monthly and $15,416 in interest. The student loan payoff calculator replays that schedule with your numbers, and the college ROI calculator weighs the full cost against the earnings table above.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $65,700 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. Wake Forest University leads it at $147,633.

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 1.6% of the 91,233 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 $147,633 sits 125% above the national field median of $65,700. Its median debt, $19,500, runs below the field median of $42,374, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.