What Engineering, General 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 Engineering, General: $74,573, then $88,104, then $93,327. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 61 programs at year one and 56 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 $93,327, which is $18,754 more than the year-one median of $74,573 (25% 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: $71,468 for graduates who received Pell, $77,567 for those who did not. The $6,099 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, Engineering, General ranks 13 of 17 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $97,669. Its closest sibling is Manufacturing Engineering at $92,450, below this field's $93,327. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Engineering, General stands number 26 by five-year earnings and number 19 by first-year earnings, and number 159 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 133 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Engineering, General graduate owe? $24,250, the graduate-weighted median over 50 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 33%, or 3.9 months of gross pay at the $74,573 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $276 a month with $8,822 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

The national median hides the real spread: inside Engineering, General, individual programs post five-year medians far from $93,327 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Harvey Mudd College sits first at $149,465.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $149,465 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 12.8% of the 2,833 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 $149,465 sits 60% above the national field median of $93,327. Its median debt, $26,000, runs above the field median of $24,250, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.