What Industrial Production Technologies/Technicians 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 Industrial Production Technologies/Technicians: $70,583, then $81,852, then $82,606. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 47 programs at year one and 54 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 $12,023 between the first and fifth year, a 17% 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.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Industrial Production Technologies/Technicians are $70,858 (received Pell) and $71,820 (did not), $962 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, Industrial Production Technologies/Technicians ranks 10 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $86,833. Its closest sibling is Computer Engineering Technologies/Technicians at $84,011, above this field's $82,606. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Industrial Production Technologies/Technicians stands number 48 by five-year earnings and number 29 by first-year earnings, and number 69 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 21 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $20,000 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 34 programs reporting debt. That is 28% of the first-year median earnings, or about 3.4 months of gross pay at $70,583 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $227 a month and interest adds $7,276 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 $82,606 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. San Jose State University leads it at $103,975.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of San Jose State University's counted graduates earn less than $103,975. 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 11.8% of the 2,485 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 $103,975 sits 26% above the national field median of $82,606. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.