What Sociology Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Sociology pays $40,718 at the first measured horizon and $57,111 at the last, and those two medians rest on 27,482 and 33,385 graduates counted respectively. The headline figures weight each reporting program by its graduates counted, so the 400-graduate program moves the national number more than the 12-graduate one; the unweighted column beside it shows the middle program, plain and simple.

From $40,718 in the first year to $57,111 in the fifth, earnings grow 40% ($16,393). 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.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $40,559 for graduates who received Pell, $41,506 for those who did not. The $947 difference tracks institutional mix and starting networks far more than it tracks the credential itself, and it is printed here because a Pell student comparing programs deserves the unblended number.

Inside its own CIP family, Sociology ranks 9 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $63,401. Its closest sibling is Social Sciences, General at $58,102, above this field's $57,111. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Sociology stands number 130 by five-year earnings and number 132 by first-year earnings, and number 29 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 101 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $19,000 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 348 programs reporting debt. That is 47% of the first-year median earnings, or about 5.6 months of gross pay at $40,718 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $216 a month and interest adds $6,912 over the life of the loan. Price your own borrowing with the student loan payoff calculator, and test the whole degree in the college ROI calculator or the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside Sociology, individual programs post five-year medians far from $57,111 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Columbia University in the City of New York sits first at $107,522.

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 0.6% of the 33,385 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 $107,522 sits 88% above the national field median of $57,111. Its median debt, $20,750, runs above the field median of $19,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.