What International Business 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 International Business: $55,318, then $74,145, then $79,058. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 81 programs at year one and 112 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 $23,740 between the first and fifth year, a 43% 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 $55,318 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $53,343, and graduates who did not earn $64,845, a gap of $11,502. 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, International Business ranks 9 of 19 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $78,466. Its closest sibling is Accounting and Related Services at $78,466, below this field's $79,058. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, International Business stands number 52 by five-year earnings and number 60 by first-year earnings, and number 74 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 22 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $20,100 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in International Business, pooled from 60 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $55,318 that balance is 36% of a year's gross pay, roughly 4.4 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $228 a month and $7,312 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

The national median hides the real spread: inside International Business, individual programs post five-year medians far from $79,058 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Georgetown University sits first at $162,214.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Georgetown University's counted graduates earn less than $162,214. 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 6.2% of the 4,126 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 $162,214 sits 105% above the national field median of $79,058. Its median debt, $13,500, runs below the field median of $20,100, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.