What Information Science/Studies Graduates Earn

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

For Information Science/Studies, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $68,240 one year after graduation, $91,671 at four years, $101,568 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 31,807 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

Earnings in this field climb $33,328 between the first and fifth year, a 49% 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.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $68,240 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $64,422, and graduates who did not earn $70,660, a gap of $6,238. 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, Information Science/Studies ranks 2 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $82,542. Its closest sibling is Computer/Information Technology Administration and Management at $96,720, below this field's $101,568. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Information Science/Studies stands number 11 by five-year earnings and number 37 by first-year earnings, and number 147 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 136 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 127 programs that report debt for Information Science/Studies, the median graduate owes $23,500. Set beside the $68,240 year-one median, the debt is 34% of first-year gross earnings, about 4.1 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $267 monthly and $8,549 in interest. The student loan payoff calculator replays that schedule with your numbers, and the college ROI calculator weighs the full cost against the earnings table above.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Where a student studies inside this field matters at least as much as the field itself. These five programs post the strongest five-year medians in Information Science/Studies among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Northwestern University at $180,786, against a national field median of $101,568.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $180,786 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 1.5% of the 31,807 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 $180,786 sits 78% above the national field median of $101,568. Its median debt, $17,750, runs below the field median of $23,500, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.