What Parks, Recreation, and Leisure Studies Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Parks, Recreation, and Leisure Studies pays $40,216 at the first measured horizon and $57,987 at the last, and those two medians rest on 2,506 and 2,909 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.

Five years out, the median graduate earns $57,987, which is $17,771 more than the year-one median of $40,216 (44% 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 $40,216 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $40,010, and graduates who did not earn $40,790, a gap of $780. 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, Parks, Recreation, and Leisure Studies ranks 2 of 3 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $57,987. Its closest sibling is Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness at $60,484, above this field's $57,987. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Parks, Recreation, and Leisure Studies stands number 122 by five-year earnings and number 136 by first-year earnings, and number 31 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 91 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $19,213 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Parks, Recreation, and Leisure Studies, pooled from 35 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $40,216 that balance is 48% of a year's gross pay, roughly 5.7 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $218 a month and $6,990 in total interest. Your own balance and rate belong in the student loan payoff calculator; the degree-level verdict belongs in the college ROI calculator and the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $57,987 five-year figure. The table ranks the reporting programs by their five-year median, keeping only programs with at least 30 graduates in that count so a tiny cohort cannot top the list by luck. San Jose State University leads it at $75,624.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $75,624 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 9.7% of the 2,909 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 $75,624 sits 30% above the national field median of $57,987. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.