What Special Education and Teaching Graduates Earn

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

For Special Education and Teaching, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $47,786 one year after graduation, $51,258 at four years, $51,998 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 9,029 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 $4,212 between the first and fifth year, a 9% rise that trails 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.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Special Education and Teaching are $47,657 (received Pell) and $49,010 (did not), $1,353 apart. The split is a reminder that a field median averages over very different starting points; the institution a student picks inside the field moves their personal figure more than the field label does.

Inside its own CIP family, Special Education and Teaching ranks 3 of 6 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $51,190. Its closest sibling is Education, General at $51,190, below this field's $51,998. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Special Education and Teaching stands number 154 by five-year earnings and number 78 by first-year earnings, and number 152 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 2 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Special Education and Teaching graduate owe? $23,635, the graduate-weighted median over 144 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 49%, or 5.9 months of gross pay at the $47,786 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $269 a month with $8,598 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

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 Special Education and Teaching among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Manhattan University at $80,792, against a national field median of $51,998.

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 2.0% of the 9,029 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 $80,792 sits 55% above the national field median of $51,998. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.