What Dental Support Services and Allied Professions 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 $70,434 year-one median and the $70,257 year-five median for Dental Support Services and Allied Professions come from federal earnings records pooled across 102 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (3,627 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

Earnings in this field climb $-177 between the first and fifth year, a -0% rise that beats 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.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $70,434 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $68,527, and graduates who did not earn $71,913, a gap of $3,386. 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, Dental Support Services and Allied Professions ranks 5 of 14 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $64,868. Its closest sibling is Health Professions and Related Clinical Sciences, Other at $67,607, below this field's $70,257. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Dental Support Services and Allied Professions stands number 81 by five-year earnings and number 30 by first-year earnings, and number 71 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 10 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 69 programs that report debt for Dental Support Services and Allied Professions, the median graduate owes $20,000. Set beside the $70,434 year-one median, the debt is 28% of first-year gross earnings, about 3.4 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $227 monthly and $7,276 in interest. The student loan payoff calculator replays that schedule with your numbers, and the college ROI calculator weighs the full cost against the earnings table above.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $70,257 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. West Coast University-Texas leads it at $91,988.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $91,988 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 12.7% of the 3,310 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 $91,988 sits 31% above the national field median of $70,257. Its median debt, $28,250, runs above the field median of $20,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.