What Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft Graduates Earn

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

For Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $30,064 one year after graduation, $40,351 at four years, $44,362 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 10,774 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

The trajectory is the story here: $30,064 at year one, $40,351 at year four, $44,362 at year five. That is 48% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $14,298 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft are $30,621 (received Pell) and $31,048 (did not), $427 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, Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft ranks 7 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $45,592. Its closest sibling is Music at $45,069, above this field's $44,362. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft stands number 179 by five-year earnings and number 179 by first-year earnings, and number 132 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 47 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $22,375 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 201 programs reporting debt. That is 74% of the first-year median earnings, or about 8.9 months of gross pay at $30,064 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $254 a month and interest adds $8,140 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

One field, many markets: the five-year median for Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft is $44,362 nationally, yet the strongest programs below run far ahead of it. The ranking keeps a 30-graduate floor under every entry, and University of Notre Dame heads the list at $77,004.

A program median describes that program's own graduates in that program's own labor market; University of Notre Dame at $77,004 is evidence about a place and a mix of students, not a wage offer. Put the same programs' prices next to these figures with the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator before ranking anything.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 1.9% of the 10,774 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 $77,004 sits 74% above the national field median of $44,362. Its median debt, $19,000, runs below the field median of $22,375, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.