What Music Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Music pays $34,264 at the first measured horizon and $45,069 at the last, and those two medians rest on 8,814 and 10,928 graduates counted respectively. The headline figures weight each reporting program by its graduates counted, so the 400-graduate program moves the national number more than the 12-graduate one; the unweighted column beside it shows the middle program, plain and simple.

The trajectory is the story here: $34,264 at year one, $43,388 at year four, $45,069 at year five. That is 32% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $10,805 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $35,156 for graduates who received Pell, $39,504 for those who did not. The $4,348 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, Music ranks 6 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $45,592. Its closest sibling is Visual and Performing Arts, General at $45,592, above this field's $45,069. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Music stands number 178 by five-year earnings and number 171 by first-year earnings, and number 153 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 25 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Music graduate owe? $23,750, the graduate-weighted median over 237 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 69%, or 8.3 months of gross pay at the $34,264 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $270 a month with $8,640 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

The national median hides the real spread: inside Music, individual programs post five-year medians far from $45,069 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Northeastern University sits first at $63,513.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Northeastern University's counted graduates earn less than $63,513. 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 2.2% of the 10,928 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 $63,513 sits 41% above the national field median of $45,069. Its median debt, $18,500, runs below the field median of $23,750, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.