What Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology pays $42,317 at the first measured horizon and $55,077 at the last, and those two medians rest on 4,028 and 3,678 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 $12,760 between the first and fifth year, a 30% 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.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology are $42,259 (received Pell) and $40,378 (did not), $1,881 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, Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology ranks 2 of 3 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $55,077. Its closest sibling is Psychology, General at $54,626, below this field's $55,077. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology stands number 139 by five-year earnings and number 123 by first-year earnings, and number 171 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 $27,000 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 63 programs reporting debt. That is 64% of the first-year median earnings, or about 7.7 months of gross pay at $42,317 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $307 a month and interest adds $9,823 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 $55,077 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. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Prescott leads it at $78,768.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Prescott's counted graduates earn less than $78,768. 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 8.5% of the 3,678 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 $78,768 sits 43% above the national field median of $55,077. Its median debt, $24,529, runs below the field median of $27,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.