What Computer Programming Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Computer Programming pays $69,872 at the first measured horizon and $82,542 at the last, and those two medians rest on 1,581 and 1,739 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.

The trajectory is the story here: $69,872 at year one, $78,404 at year four, $82,542 at year five. That is 18% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $12,670 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve demands patience from anyone carrying the median debt.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $69,872 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $64,922, and graduates who did not earn $71,057, a gap of $6,135. 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 Programming ranks 5 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $82,542. Its closest sibling is Computer Systems Networking and Telecommunications at $78,370, below this field's $82,542. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Computer Programming stands number 49 by five-year earnings and number 31 by first-year earnings, and number 86 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 37 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Computer Programming graduate owe? $20,500, the graduate-weighted median over 25 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 29%, or 3.5 months of gross pay at the $69,872 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $233 a month with $7,458 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

One field, many markets: the five-year median for Computer Programming is $82,542 nationally, yet the strongest programs below run far ahead of it. The ranking keeps a 30-graduate floor under every entry, and DigiPen Institute of Technology heads the list at $131,174.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of DigiPen Institute of Technology's counted graduates earn less than $131,174. 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 22.6% of the 1,739 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 $131,174 sits 59% above the national field median of $82,542. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.