What Ecology, Evolution, Systematics, and Population Biology Graduates Earn

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

For Ecology, Evolution, Systematics, and Population Biology, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $34,272 one year after graduation, $49,821 at four years, $53,995 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 2,607 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

From $34,272 in the first year to $53,995 in the fifth, earnings grow 58% ($19,723). For scale, the median bachelor's field in the Scorecard file grows from $45,010 to $65,763 over the same span, so this field's early-career slope is steeper than typical.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Ecology, Evolution, Systematics, and Population Biology are $32,716 (received Pell) and $33,305 (did not), $589 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, Ecology, Evolution, Systematics, and Population Biology ranks 9 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $70,226. Its closest sibling is Zoology/Animal Biology at $51,382, below this field's $53,995. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Ecology, Evolution, Systematics, and Population Biology stands number 146 by five-year earnings and number 170 by first-year earnings, and number 75 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 71 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Ecology, Evolution, Systematics, and Population Biology graduate owe? $20,175, the graduate-weighted median over 65 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 59%, or 7.1 months of gross pay at the $34,272 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $229 a month with $7,340 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 $53,995 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. University of Maryland-College Park leads it at $76,367.

Treat the top of this table as a research list, not a ranking to enroll by: medians reflect local labor markets and student mix as much as teaching. The honest comparison pairs each program's earnings here with its net price from the net price estimator and its four-year total from the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 12.3% of the 2,607 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 $76,367 sits 41% above the national field median of $53,995. Its median debt, $15,926, runs below the field median of $20,175, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.