What Family and Consumer Economics and Related Studies Graduates Earn

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

For Family and Consumer Economics and Related Studies, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $41,245 one year after graduation, $50,074 at four years, $54,107 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 1,913 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: $41,245 at year one, $50,074 at year four, $54,107 at year five. That is 31% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $12,862 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 Family and Consumer Economics and Related Studies are $41,066 (received Pell) and $42,155 (did not), $1,089 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, Family and Consumer Economics and Related Studies ranks 2 of 5 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $53,457. Its closest sibling is Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, General at $53,457, below this field's $54,107. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Family and Consumer Economics and Related Studies stands number 145 by five-year earnings and number 128 by first-year earnings, and number 62 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 83 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $19,750 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Family and Consumer Economics and Related Studies, pooled from 12 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $41,245 that balance is 48% of a year's gross pay, roughly 5.7 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $224 a month and $7,185 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $54,107 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. Texas Tech University leads it at $80,824.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Texas Tech University's counted graduates earn less than $80,824. 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 18.8% of the 1,913 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 $80,824 sits 49% above the national field median of $54,107. Its median debt, $20,229, runs above the field median of $19,750, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.