What Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication Graduates Earn

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

For Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $49,501 one year after graduation, $66,709 at four years, $71,697 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 18,190 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

From $49,501 in the first year to $71,697 in the fifth, earnings grow 45% ($22,196). For scale, the median bachelor's field in the Scorecard file grows from $45,010 to $65,763 over the same span, so this field's early-career slope is gentler than typical.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $49,501 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $47,940, and graduates who did not earn $52,079, a gap of $4,139. 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 Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication ranks 1 of 5 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $63,023. Its closest sibling is Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs, Other at $67,287, below this field's $71,697. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication stands number 73 by five-year earnings and number 75 by first-year earnings, and number 67 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 6 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication graduate owe? $19,916, the graduate-weighted median over 143 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 40%, or 4.8 months of gross pay at the $49,501 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $226 a month with $7,245 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 Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication, individual programs post five-year medians far from $71,697 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; University of Southern California sits first at $101,953.

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 3.1% of the 18,190 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 $101,953 sits 42% above the national field median of $71,697. Its median debt, $12,125, runs below the field median of $19,916, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.