What Microbiological Sciences and Immunology Graduates Earn

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

For Microbiological Sciences and Immunology, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $42,913 one year after graduation, $64,428 at four years, $70,530 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 2,297 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

From $42,913 in the first year to $70,530 in the fifth, earnings grow 64% ($27,617). For scale, the median bachelor's field in the Scorecard file grows from $45,010 to $65,763 over the same span, so this field's early-career slope is steeper than typical.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $40,938 for graduates who received Pell, $46,144 for those who did not. The $5,206 difference tracks institutional mix and starting networks far more than it tracks the credential itself, and it is printed here because a Pell student comparing programs deserves the unblended number.

Inside its own CIP family, Microbiological Sciences and Immunology ranks 5 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $70,226. Its closest sibling is Neurobiology and Neurosciences at $70,226, below this field's $70,530. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Microbiological Sciences and Immunology stands number 78 by five-year earnings and number 116 by first-year earnings, and number 24 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 54 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $18,981 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 52 programs reporting debt. That is 44% of the first-year median earnings, or about 5.3 months of gross pay at $42,913 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $216 a month and interest adds $6,905 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

The national median hides the real spread: inside Microbiological Sciences and Immunology, individual programs post five-year medians far from $70,530 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; University of California-Santa Barbara sits first at $86,328.

A program median describes that program's own graduates in that program's own labor market; University of California-Santa Barbara at $86,328 is evidence about a place and a mix of students, not a wage offer. Put the same programs' prices next to these figures with the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator before ranking anything.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 8.4% of the 2,297 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 $86,328 sits 22% above the national field median of $70,530. Its median debt, $14,607, runs below the field median of $18,981, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.