What Communication Disorders Sciences and Services 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 $33,606 year-one median and the $61,941 year-five median for Communication Disorders Sciences and Services come from federal earnings records pooled across 321 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (4,635 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

Earnings in this field climb $28,335 between the first and fifth year, a 84% 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.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Communication Disorders Sciences and Services post a median of $35,691, non-recipients $35,226. That $465 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Inside its own CIP family, Communication Disorders Sciences and Services ranks 10 of 14 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $64,868. Its closest sibling is Public Health at $62,420, above this field's $61,941. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Communication Disorders Sciences and Services stands number 106 by five-year earnings and number 173 by first-year earnings, and number 47 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 59 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $19,500 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 211 programs reporting debt. That is 58% of the first-year median earnings, or about 7.0 months of gross pay at $33,606 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $222 a month and interest adds $7,094 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 $61,941 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. Loma Linda University leads it at $90,244.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $90,244 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 2.3% of the 12,946 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 $90,244 sits 46% above the national field median of $61,941. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.