What Cognitive Science Graduates Earn

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

Nothing on this page is a survey response or a recruiter's claim: the $46,650 year-one median and the $85,575 year-five median for Cognitive Science come from federal earnings records pooled across 72 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (1,797 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

From $46,650 in the first year to $85,575 in the fifth, earnings grow 83% ($38,925). 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: $46,152 for graduates who received Pell, $49,219 for those who did not. The $3,067 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, Cognitive Science ranks 1 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $62,349. Its closest sibling is Biological and Physical Sciences at $78,287, below this field's $85,575. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Cognitive Science stands number 40 by five-year earnings and number 82 by first-year earnings, and number 1 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 39 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $13,799 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 17 programs reporting debt. That is 30% of the first-year median earnings, or about 3.5 months of gross pay at $46,650 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $157 a month and interest adds $5,020 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 $85,575 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 California-Berkeley leads it at $151,004.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of University of California-Berkeley's counted graduates earn less than $151,004. 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 58.7% of the 1,048 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 $151,004 sits 76% above the national field median of $85,575. Its median debt, $13,000, runs below the field median of $13,799, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.