What Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering Graduates Earn

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

For Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $82,356 one year after graduation, $99,542 at four years, $105,202 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 18,298 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

Five years out, the median graduate earns $105,202, which is $22,846 more than the year-one median of $82,356 (28% growth). Set against the median field overall ($45,010 at year one, $65,763 at year five), this field starts above the pack and ends above it.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $82,553 for graduates who received Pell, $83,646 for those who did not. The $1,093 difference tracks institutional mix and starting networks far more than it tracks the credential itself, and it is printed here because a Pell student comparing programs deserves the unblended number.

Inside its own CIP family, Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering ranks 5 of 17 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $97,669. Its closest sibling is Industrial Engineering at $105,216, above this field's $105,202. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering stands number 7 by five-year earnings and number 5 by first-year earnings, and number 104 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 97 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 208 programs that report debt for Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering, the median graduate owes $21,229. Set beside the $82,356 year-one median, the debt is 26% of first-year gross earnings, about 3.1 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $241 monthly and $7,723 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 $105,202 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 California-Berkeley leads it at $224,040.

A program median describes that program's own graduates in that program's own labor market; University of California-Berkeley at $224,040 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 3.6% of the 18,298 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 $224,040 sits 113% above the national field median of $105,202. Its median debt, $13,548, runs below the field median of $21,229, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.