What Hospitality Administration/Management 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 Hospitality Administration/Management: $46,372, then $56,667, then $59,895. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 135 programs at year one and 149 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

From $46,372 in the first year to $59,895 in the fifth, earnings grow 29% ($13,523). For scale, the median bachelor's field in the Scorecard file grows from $45,010 to $65,763 over the same span, so this field's early-career slope is gentler than typical.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Hospitality Administration/Management are $45,156 (received Pell) and $50,000 (did not), $4,844 apart. The split is a reminder that a field median averages over very different starting points; the institution a student picks inside the field moves their personal figure more than the field label does.

Inside its own CIP family, Hospitality Administration/Management ranks 19 of 19 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $78,466. Its closest sibling is Specialized Sales, Merchandising and Marketing Operations at $59,993, above this field's $59,895. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Hospitality Administration/Management stands number 118 by five-year earnings and number 83 by first-year earnings, and number 61 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 57 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $19,750 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Hospitality Administration/Management, pooled from 92 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $46,372 that balance is 43% of a year's gross pay, roughly 5.1 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $224 a month and $7,185 in total interest. Your own balance and rate belong in the student loan payoff calculator; the degree-level verdict belongs in the college ROI calculator and the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $59,895 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. Cornell University leads it at $112,976.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $112,976 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 2.9% of the 13,239 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 $112,976 sits 89% above the national field median of $59,895. Its median debt, $10,883, runs below the field median of $19,750, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.