What Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities Graduates Earn

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

For Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $43,139 one year after graduation, $53,833 at four years, $56,190 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 56,353 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

The trajectory is the story here: $43,139 at year one, $53,833 at year four, $56,190 at year five. That is 30% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $13,051 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities post a median of $42,813, non-recipients $46,060. That $3,247 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities is the only field in its two-digit CIP family that cleared this site's publication bar of 10 programs reporting at every horizon, which itself says something about how concentrated the federal earnings data are: whole families of study rest on a handful of reporting programs.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities stands number 133 by five-year earnings and number 113 by first-year earnings, and number 94 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 39 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $20,745 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 404 programs reporting debt. That is 48% of the first-year median earnings, or about 5.8 months of gross pay at $43,139 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $236 a month and interest adds $7,547 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

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 Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Yale University at $134,564, against a national field median of $56,190.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $134,564 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 0.8% of the 56,353 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 $134,564 sits 139% above the national field median of $56,190. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.