What Cell/Cellular Biology and Anatomical Sciences Graduates Earn

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

For Cell/Cellular Biology and Anatomical Sciences, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $44,764 one year after graduation, $69,849 at four years, $74,590 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 2,189 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 $44,764 in the first year to $74,590 in the fifth, earnings grow 67% ($29,826). 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.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $48,613 for graduates who received Pell, $42,010 for those who did not. The $6,603 difference tracks institutional mix and starting networks far more than it tracks the credential itself, and it is printed here because a Pell student comparing programs deserves the unblended number.

Inside its own CIP family, Cell/Cellular Biology and Anatomical Sciences ranks 3 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $70,226. Its closest sibling is Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology at $72,234, below this field's $74,590. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Cell/Cellular Biology and Anatomical Sciences stands number 64 by five-year earnings and number 93 by first-year earnings, and number 10 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 54 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $17,679 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Cell/Cellular Biology and Anatomical Sciences, pooled from 30 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $44,764 that balance is 39% of a year's gross pay, roughly 4.7 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $201 a month and $6,432 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 Cell/Cellular Biology and Anatomical Sciences among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by University of California-Berkeley at $93,159, against a national field median of $74,590.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $93,159 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 25.4% of the 2,189 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 $93,159 sits 25% above the national field median of $74,590. Its median debt, $11,000, runs below the field median of $17,679, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.