What Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness pays $37,878 at the first measured horizon and $60,484 at the last, and those two medians rest on 37,059 and 53,739 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.

The trajectory is the story here: $37,878 at year one, $55,288 at year four, $60,484 at year five. That is 60% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $22,606 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness are $36,111 (received Pell) and $39,845 (did not), $3,734 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, Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness ranks 1 of 3 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $57,987. Its closest sibling is Parks, Recreation, and Leisure Studies at $57,987, below this field's $60,484. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness stands number 114 by five-year earnings and number 154 by first-year earnings, and number 106 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 8 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $21,354 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 624 programs reporting debt. That is 56% of the first-year median earnings, or about 6.8 months of gross pay at $37,878 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $243 a month and interest adds $7,769 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

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 Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by Emory University at $94,407, against a national field median of $60,484.

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 1.1% of the 53,739 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 $94,407 sits 56% above the national field median of $60,484. Its median debt, $12,250, runs below the field median of $21,354, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.