What Social Sciences, Other Graduates Earn

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

For Social Sciences, Other, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $43,588 one year after graduation, $56,628 at four years, $63,529 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 1,609 people in the five-year pool, which is why they can sit above or below the unweighted middle program shown in the next column.

The trajectory is the story here: $43,588 at year one, $56,628 at year four, $63,529 at year five. That is 46% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $19,941 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Social Sciences, Other post a median of $43,777, non-recipients $43,809. That $32 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Inside its own CIP family, Social Sciences, Other ranks 5 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $63,401. Its closest sibling is Geography and Cartography at $63,401, below this field's $63,529. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Social Sciences, Other stands number 100 by five-year earnings and number 110 by first-year earnings, and number 15 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 85 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $18,375 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Social Sciences, Other, pooled from 21 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $43,588 that balance is 42% of a year's gross pay, roughly 5.1 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $209 a month and $6,685 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

Where a student studies inside this field matters at least as much as the field itself. These five programs post the strongest five-year medians in Social Sciences, Other among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by University of California-Berkeley at $107,565, against a national field median of $63,529.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $107,565 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 20.3% of the 1,609 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 $107,565 sits 69% above the national field median of $63,529. Its median debt, $13,081, runs below the field median of $18,375, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.