What Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, General Graduates Earn

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

For Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, General, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $38,145 one year after graduation, $50,361 at four years, $53,457 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 3,838 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

From $38,145 in the first year to $53,457 in the fifth, earnings grow 40% ($15,312). For scale, the median bachelor's field in the Scorecard file grows from $45,010 to $65,763 over the same span, so this field's early-career slope is gentler than typical.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $38,009 for graduates who received Pell, $38,852 for those who did not. The $843 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, Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, General ranks 3 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 Economics and Related Studies at $54,107, above this field's $53,457. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, General stands number 148 by five-year earnings and number 151 by first-year earnings, and number 73 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 75 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $20,000 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, General, pooled from 25 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $38,145 that balance is 52% of a year's gross pay, roughly 6.3 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $227 a month and $7,276 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 Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, General, individual programs post five-year medians far from $53,457 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; SUNY Oneonta sits first at $68,662.

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 24.1% of the 3,838 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 $68,662 sits 28% above the national field median of $53,457. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.