What Homeland Security Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Homeland Security pays $62,578 at the first measured horizon and $74,972 at the last, and those two medians rest on 2,483 and 1,845 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 $12,394 between the first and fifth year, a 20% 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.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $62,021 for graduates who received Pell, $49,583 for those who did not. The $12,438 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, Homeland Security ranks 2 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, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Other at $70,475, below this field's $74,972. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Homeland Security stands number 63 by five-year earnings and number 48 by first-year earnings, and number 122 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 59 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $22,000 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 31 programs reporting debt. That is 35% of the first-year median earnings, or about 4.2 months of gross pay at $62,578 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $250 a month and interest adds $8,004 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $74,972 five-year figure. The table ranks the reporting programs by their five-year median, keeping only programs with at least 30 graduates in that count so a tiny cohort cannot top the list by luck. University at Albany leads it at $88,401.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of University at Albany's counted graduates earn less than $88,401. 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 15.6% of the 1,845 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 $88,401 sits 18% above the national field median of $74,972. Its median debt, $19,500, runs below the field median of $22,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.