What Forestry Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Forestry pays $46,652 at the first measured horizon and $61,542 at the last, and those two medians rest on 1,048 and 1,274 graduates counted respectively. The headline figures weight each reporting program by its graduates counted, so the 400-graduate program moves the national number more than the 12-graduate one; the unweighted column beside it shows the middle program, plain and simple.

The trajectory is the story here: $46,652 at year one, $58,499 at year four, $61,542 at year five. That is 32% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $14,890 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 $46,652 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $46,534, and graduates who did not earn $47,094, a gap of $560. 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, Forestry ranks 1 of 4 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $57,893. Its closest sibling is Natural Resources Conservation and Research at $60,365, below this field's $61,542. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Forestry stands number 108 by five-year earnings and number 81 by first-year earnings, and number 28 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 80 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Forestry graduate owe? $19,000, the graduate-weighted median over 26 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 41%, or 4.9 months of gross pay at the $46,652 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $216 a month with $6,912 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside Forestry, individual programs post five-year medians far from $61,542 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; North Carolina State University at Raleigh sits first at $91,156.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of North Carolina State University at Raleigh's counted graduates earn less than $91,156. 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 23.0% of the 1,274 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 $91,156 sits 48% above the national field median of $61,542. Its median debt, $18,115, runs below the field median of $19,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.