What Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Services 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 Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Services: $43,941, then $55,134, then $59,394. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 40 programs at year one and 73 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 $59,394, which is $15,453 more than the year-one median of $43,941 (35% growth). Set against the median field overall ($45,010 at year one, $65,763 at year five), this field starts below the pack and ends below it.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Services are $45,343 (received Pell) and $43,803 (did not), $1,540 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, Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Services ranks 11 of 14 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $64,868. Its closest sibling is Communication Disorders Sciences and Services at $61,941, above this field's $59,394. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Services stands number 119 by five-year earnings and number 105 by first-year earnings, and number 134 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 15 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $22,460 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Services, pooled from 42 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $43,941 that balance is 51% of a year's gross pay, roughly 6.1 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $255 a month and $8,171 in total interest. Your own balance and rate belong in the student loan payoff calculator; the degree-level verdict belongs in the college ROI calculator and the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $59,394 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. California State University-Long Beach leads it at $73,782.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of California State University-Long Beach's counted graduates earn less than $73,782. 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 8.7% of the 3,509 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 $73,782 sits 24% above the national field median of $59,394. Its median debt, $13,539, runs below the field median of $22,460, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.