What Dance Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Dance pays $28,555 at the first measured horizon and $43,162 at the last, and those two medians rest on 1,737 and 1,565 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.

Earnings in this field climb $14,607 between the first and fifth year, a 51% 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.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Dance are $30,169 (received Pell) and $30,799 (did not), $630 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, Dance ranks 8 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $45,592. Its closest sibling is Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft at $44,362, above this field's $43,162. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Dance stands number 180 by five-year earnings and number 180 by first-year earnings, and number 157 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 23 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Dance graduate owe? $24,142, the graduate-weighted median over 47 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 85%, or 10.1 months of gross pay at the $28,555 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $274 a month with $8,783 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $43,162 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. Marymount Manhattan College leads it at $54,731.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Marymount Manhattan College's counted graduates earn less than $54,731. 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 14.4% of the 1,565 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 $54,731 sits 27% above the national field median of $43,162. Its median debt, $27,000, runs above the field median of $24,142, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.