What Philosophy Graduates Earn

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

Nothing on this page is a survey response or a recruiter's claim: the $39,593 year-one median and the $64,700 year-five median for Philosophy come from federal earnings records pooled across 819 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (2,956 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

Earnings in this field climb $25,107 between the first and fifth year, a 63% rise that trails the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $39,593 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $41,338, and graduates who did not earn $42,415, a gap of $1,077. 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, Philosophy ranks 1 of 2 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $48,482. Its closest sibling is Religion/Religious Studies at $48,482, below this field's $64,700. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Philosophy stands number 98 by five-year earnings and number 140 by first-year earnings, and number 12 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 86 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 71 programs that report debt for Philosophy, the median graduate owes $18,000. Set beside the $39,593 year-one median, the debt is 45% of first-year gross earnings, about 5.5 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $205 monthly and $6,548 in interest. The student loan payoff calculator replays that schedule with your numbers, and the college ROI calculator weighs the full cost against the earnings table above.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside Philosophy, individual programs post five-year medians far from $64,700 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Boston College sits first at $123,546.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $123,546 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 8.7% of the 3,103 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 $123,546 sits 91% above the national field median of $64,700. Its median debt, $19,000, runs above the field median of $18,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.