What Public Policy Analysis Graduates Earn

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

For Public Policy Analysis, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $52,170 one year after graduation, $71,723 at four years, $76,951 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 1,424 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

Earnings in this field climb $24,781 between the first and fifth year, a 48% rise that beats 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 $52,170 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $52,413, and graduates who did not earn $65,241, a gap of $12,828. 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, Public Policy Analysis ranks 1 of 5 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $54,309. Its closest sibling is Public Administration at $65,826, below this field's $76,951. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Public Policy Analysis stands number 58 by five-year earnings and number 69 by first-year earnings, and number 25 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 33 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Public Policy Analysis graduate owe? $19,000, the graduate-weighted median over 35 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 36%, or 4.4 months of gross pay at the $52,170 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $216 a month with $6,912 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $76,951 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. Cornell University leads it at $121,467.

Treat the top of this table as a research list, not a ranking to enroll by: medians reflect local labor markets and student mix as much as teaching. The honest comparison pairs each program's earnings here with its net price from the net price estimator and its four-year total from the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 24.7% of the 1,424 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 $121,467 sits 58% above the national field median of $76,951. Its median debt, $12,696, runs below the field median of $19,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.