What Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Other Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Other pays $52,084 at the first measured horizon and $70,475 at the last, and those two medians rest on 734 and 639 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.

Earnings in this field climb $18,391 between the first and fifth year, a 35% 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.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Other post a median of $47,971, non-recipients $59,533. That $11,562 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Inside its own CIP family, Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Other ranks 3 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, above this field's $70,475. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Other stands number 79 by five-year earnings and number 70 by first-year earnings, and number 21 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 58 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $18,750 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 8 programs reporting debt. That is 36% of the first-year median earnings, or about 4.3 months of gross pay at $52,084 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $213 a month and interest adds $6,821 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

The national median hides the real spread: inside Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Other, individual programs post five-year medians far from $70,475 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Neumann University sits first at $138,163.

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 41.5% of the 639 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 $138,163 sits 96% above the national field median of $70,475. Its median debt, $20,000, runs above the field median of $18,750, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.