What Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, Other Graduates Earn

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

For Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, Other, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $48,106 one year after graduation, $56,155 at four years, $57,309 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 26,679 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 $48,106 in the first year to $57,309 in the fifth, earnings grow 19% ($9,203). 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 gentler than typical.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $48,106 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $47,685, and graduates who did not earn $51,262, a gap of $3,577. 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, Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, Other ranks 6 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $62,349. Its closest sibling is Multi-/Interdisciplinary Studies, General at $53,119, below this field's $57,309. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, Other stands number 129 by five-year earnings and number 77 by first-year earnings, and number 52 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 77 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $19,500 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 155 programs reporting debt. That is 41% of the first-year median earnings, or about 4.9 months of gross pay at $48,106 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $222 a month and interest adds $7,094 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 Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, Other, individual programs post five-year medians far from $57,309 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; University of the Pacific sits first at $165,455.

A program median describes that program's own graduates in that program's own labor market; University of the Pacific at $165,455 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 3.1% of the 26,679 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 $165,455 sits 189% above the national field median of $57,309. Its median debt, $12,000, runs below the field median of $19,500, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.