What Film/Video and Photographic Arts Graduates Earn

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

For Film/Video and Photographic Arts, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $30,985 one year after graduation, $44,829 at four years, $48,612 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 10,466 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: $30,985 at year one, $44,829 at year four, $48,612 at year five. That is 57% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $17,627 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $30,985 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $30,801, and graduates who did not earn $31,397, a gap of $596. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, Film/Video and Photographic Arts ranks 3 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $45,592. Its closest sibling is Fine and Studio Arts at $45,885, below this field's $48,612. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Film/Video and Photographic Arts stands number 167 by five-year earnings and number 177 by first-year earnings, and number 115 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 52 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 141 programs that report debt for Film/Video and Photographic Arts, the median graduate owes $21,500. Set beside the $30,985 year-one median, the debt is 69% of first-year gross earnings, about 8.3 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $244 monthly and $7,822 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

One field, many markets: the five-year median for Film/Video and Photographic Arts is $48,612 nationally, yet the strongest programs below run far ahead of it. The ranking keeps a 30-graduate floor under every entry, and University of California-Berkeley heads the list at $68,814.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $68,814 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 4.9% of the 10,466 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 $68,814 sits 42% above the national field median of $48,612. Its median debt, $12,979, runs below the field median of $21,500, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.