What Computer Engineering Graduates Earn

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

For Computer Engineering, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $85,528 one year after graduation, $112,269 at four years, $120,186 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 10,101 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

Five years out, the median graduate earns $120,186, which is $34,658 more than the year-one median of $85,528 (41% 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.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $85,528 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $85,798, and graduates who did not earn $88,790, a gap of $2,992. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, Computer Engineering ranks 1 of 17 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $97,669. Its closest sibling is Petroleum Engineering at $116,694, below this field's $120,186. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Computer Engineering stands number 2 by five-year earnings and number 3 by first-year earnings, and number 120 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 118 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $21,675 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 161 programs reporting debt. That is 25% of the first-year median earnings, or about 3.0 months of gross pay at $85,528 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $246 a month and interest adds $7,885 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

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 Computer Engineering among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Duke University at $193,134, against a national field median of $120,186.

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 2.2% of the 10,101 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 $193,134 sits 61% above the national field median of $120,186. Its median debt, $12,000, runs below the field median of $21,675, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.