What Engineering Technologies/Technicians, 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 Technologies/Technicians, General: $67,295, then $81,554, then $84,256. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 35 programs at year one and 34 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

The trajectory is the story here: $67,295 at year one, $81,554 at year four, $84,256 at year five. That is 25% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $16,961 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Engineering Technologies/Technicians, General post a median of $70,660, non-recipients $70,850. That $190 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Inside its own CIP family, Engineering Technologies/Technicians, General ranks 8 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $86,833. Its closest sibling is Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians at $84,011, below this field's $84,256. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Engineering Technologies/Technicians, General stands number 45 by five-year earnings and number 39 by first-year earnings, and number 41 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 4 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $19,500 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Engineering Technologies/Technicians, General, pooled from 33 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $67,295 that balance is 29% of a year's gross pay, roughly 3.5 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $222 a month and $7,094 in total interest. Your own balance and rate belong in the student loan payoff calculator; the degree-level verdict belongs in the college ROI calculator and the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside Engineering Technologies/Technicians, General, individual programs post five-year medians far from $84,256 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Drexel University sits first at $92,817.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $92,817 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 27.4% of the 2,022 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 $92,817 sits 10% above the national field median of $84,256. Its median debt, $31,000, runs above the field median of $19,500, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.