What Ethnic, Cultural Minority, Gender, and Group Studies 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 Ethnic, Cultural Minority, Gender, and Group Studies: $40,138, then $55,088, then $57,622. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 89 programs at year one and 110 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: $40,138 at year one, $55,088 at year four, $57,622 at year five. That is 44% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $17,484 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $40,457 for graduates who received Pell, $40,202 for those who did not. The $255 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, Ethnic, Cultural Minority, Gender, and Group Studies ranks 2 of 2 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $57,622. Its closest sibling is Area Studies at $67,465, above this field's $57,622. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Ethnic, Cultural Minority, Gender, and Group Studies stands number 127 by five-year earnings and number 137 by first-year earnings, and number 4 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 123 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 67 programs that report debt for Ethnic, Cultural Minority, Gender, and Group Studies, the median graduate owes $16,250. Set beside the $40,138 year-one median, the debt is 40% of first-year gross earnings, about 4.9 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $185 monthly and $5,912 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 $57,622 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 $70,758.

Treat the top of this table as a research list, not a ranking to enroll by: medians reflect local labor markets and student mix as much as teaching. The honest comparison pairs each program's earnings here with its net price from the net price estimator and its four-year total from the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 9.0% of the 4,442 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 $70,758 sits 23% above the national field median of $57,622. Its median debt, $12,204, runs below the field median of $16,250, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.