What Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Graduates Earn

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

For Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $50,148 one year after graduation, $59,809 at four years, $67,447 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 2,522 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

The trajectory is the story here: $50,148 at year one, $59,809 at year four, $67,447 at year five. That is 34% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $17,299 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations are $41,150 (received Pell) and $57,551 (did not), $16,401 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, Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations ranks 15 of 19 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $78,466. Its closest sibling is Business/Commerce, General at $65,700, below this field's $67,447. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations stands number 87 by five-year earnings and number 74 by first-year earnings, and number 136 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 49 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations graduate owe? $22,500, the graduate-weighted median over 57 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 45%, or 5.4 months of gross pay at the $50,148 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $256 a month with $8,185 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 $67,447 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. Brown University leads it at $147,661.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $147,661 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 10.9% of the 2,522 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 $147,661 sits 119% above the national field median of $67,447. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.