What Engineering-Related Fields 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-Related Fields: $74,839, then $91,035, then $96,473. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 27 programs at year one and 32 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

Earnings in this field climb $21,634 between the first and fifth year, a 29% rise that beats the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Engineering-Related Fields are $74,416 (received Pell) and $76,195 (did not), $1,779 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, Engineering-Related Fields ranks 2 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $86,833. Its closest sibling is Electrical/Electronic Engineering Technologies/Technicians at $92,362, below this field's $96,473. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Engineering-Related Fields stands number 21 by five-year earnings and number 17 by first-year earnings, and number 135 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 114 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Engineering-Related Fields graduate owe? $22,475, the graduate-weighted median over 24 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 30%, or 3.6 months of gross pay at the $74,839 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $255 a month with $8,176 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 $96,473 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. Stevens Institute of Technology leads it at $119,677.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Stevens Institute of Technology's counted graduates earn less than $119,677. 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 14.7% of the 1,574 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 $119,677 sits 24% above the national field median of $96,473. Its median debt, $23,250, runs above the field median of $22,475, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.