What Fire Protection 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 Fire Protection: $82,625, then $88,735, then $90,568. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 23 programs at year one and 17 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

Earnings in this field climb $7,943 between the first and fifth year, a 10% rise that beats the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $82,625 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $88,844, and graduates who did not earn $103,830, a gap of $14,986. 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, Fire Protection ranks 1 of 5 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $70,475. Its closest sibling is Homeland Security at $74,972, below this field's $90,568. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Fire Protection stands number 32 by five-year earnings and number 4 by first-year earnings, and number 77 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 45 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $20,251 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 12 programs reporting debt. That is 25% of the first-year median earnings, or about 2.9 months of gross pay at $82,625 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $230 a month and interest adds $7,367 over the life of the loan. Price your own borrowing with the student loan payoff calculator, and test the whole degree in the college ROI calculator or the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

One field, many markets: the five-year median for Fire Protection is $90,568 nationally, yet the strongest programs below run far ahead of it. The ranking keeps a 30-graduate floor under every entry, and Anna Maria College heads the list at $114,856.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Anna Maria College's counted graduates earn less than $114,856. 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 51.4% of the 998 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 $114,856 sits 27% above the national field median of $90,568. Its median debt, $25,000, runs above the field median of $20,251, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.