What Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians Graduates Earn

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

The three rows below are the whole earnings story Scorecard can tell about Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians: $65,931, then $79,501, then $84,011. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 25 programs at year one and 24 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

Five years out, the median graduate earns $84,011, which is $18,080 more than the year-one median of $65,931 (27% growth). Set against the median field overall ($45,010 at year one, $65,763 at year five), this field starts above the pack and ends above it.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians are $72,445 (received Pell) and $83,838 (did not), $11,393 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, Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians ranks 9 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $86,833. Its closest sibling is Engineering Technologies/Technicians, General at $84,256, above this field's $84,011. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians stands number 46 by five-year earnings and number 41 by first-year earnings, and number 175 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 129 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $29,341 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 21 programs reporting debt. That is 45% of the first-year median earnings, or about 5.3 months of gross pay at $65,931 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $333 a month and interest adds $10,674 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

The national median hides the real spread: inside Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians, individual programs post five-year medians far from $84,011 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sits first at $135,768.

Treat the top of this table as a research list, not a ranking to enroll by: medians reflect local labor markets and student mix as much as teaching. The honest comparison pairs each program's earnings here with its net price from the net price estimator and its four-year total from the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 22.1% of the 1,799 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 $135,768 sits 62% above the national field median of $84,011. Its median debt, $22,125, runs below the field median of $29,341, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.