What Legal Support Services 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 Legal Support Services: $42,476, then $52,657, then $53,295. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 24 programs at year one and 29 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

Five years out, the median graduate earns $53,295, which is $10,819 more than the year-one median of $42,476 (25% growth). Set against the median field overall ($45,010 at year one, $65,763 at year five), this field starts below the pack and ends below it.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $42,476 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $41,053, and graduates who did not earn $45,204, a gap of $4,151. 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, Legal Support Services ranks 3 of 3 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $65,626. Its closest sibling is Non-Professional Legal Studies at $65,626, above this field's $53,295. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Legal Support Services stands number 150 by five-year earnings and number 121 by first-year earnings, and number 174 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 24 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Legal Support Services graduate owe? $28,501, the graduate-weighted median over 26 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 67%, or 8.1 months of gross pay at the $42,476 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $324 a month with $10,369 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

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 Legal Support Services among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Grand Valley State University at $66,020, against a national field median of $53,295.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $66,020 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 21.9% of the 1,196 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 $66,020 sits 24% above the national field median of $53,295. Its median debt, $21,000, runs below the field median of $28,501, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.