What Business/Managerial Economics Graduates Earn

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

For Business/Managerial Economics, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $57,503 one year after graduation, $80,588 at four years, $86,694 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 4,767 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 $57,503 in the first year to $86,694 in the fifth, earnings grow 51% ($29,191). 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 steeper than typical.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $57,503 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $54,717, and graduates who did not earn $58,413, a gap of $3,696. 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/Managerial Economics ranks 5 of 19 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $78,466. Its closest sibling is Real Estate at $86,150, below this field's $86,694. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Business/Managerial Economics stands number 38 by five-year earnings and number 57 by first-year earnings, and number 38 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 0 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $19,500 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Business/Managerial Economics, pooled from 52 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $57,503 that balance is 34% of a year's gross pay, roughly 4.1 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $222 a month and $7,094 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

Where a student studies inside this field matters at least as much as the field itself. These five programs post the strongest five-year medians in Business/Managerial Economics among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by University of California-Los Angeles at $144,689, against a national field median of $86,694.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of University of California-Los Angeles's counted graduates earn less than $144,689. 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 5.5% of the 4,767 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 $144,689 sits 67% above the national field median of $86,694. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.