What Psychology, General Graduates Earn

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

The three rows below are the whole earnings story Scorecard can tell about Psychology, General: $37,593, then $50,549, then $54,626. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 963 programs at year one and 1,079 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

The trajectory is the story here: $37,593 at year one, $50,549 at year four, $54,626 at year five. That is 45% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $17,033 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $37,593 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $36,311, and graduates who did not earn $39,451, a gap of $3,140. 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, Psychology, General ranks 3 of 3 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $55,077. Its closest sibling is Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology at $55,077, above this field's $54,626. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Psychology, General stands number 143 by five-year earnings and number 155 by first-year earnings, and number 90 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 53 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 991 programs that report debt for Psychology, General, the median graduate owes $20,500. Set beside the $37,593 year-one median, the debt is 55% of first-year gross earnings, about 6.5 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $233 monthly and $7,458 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $54,626 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. Carnegie Mellon University leads it at $96,953.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Carnegie Mellon University's counted graduates earn less than $96,953. 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 0.2% of the 141,067 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 $96,953 sits 77% above the national field median of $54,626. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.