What Sustainability Studies Graduates Earn

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

Start with the shape of the table: Sustainability Studies pays $44,647 at the first measured horizon and $62,349 at the last, and those two medians rest on 1,036 and 316 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 $44,647 in the first year to $62,349 in the fifth, earnings grow 40% ($17,702). 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 $44,647 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $44,584, and graduates who did not earn $44,800, a gap of $216. 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, Sustainability Studies ranks 5 of 8 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $62,349. Its closest sibling is Nutrition Sciences at $63,372, above this field's $62,349. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Sustainability Studies stands number 105 by five-year earnings and number 96 by first-year earnings, and number 27 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 78 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 25 programs that report debt for Sustainability Studies, the median graduate owes $19,000. Set beside the $44,647 year-one median, the debt is 43% of first-year gross earnings, about 5.1 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $216 monthly and $6,912 in interest. The student loan payoff calculator replays that schedule with your numbers, and the college ROI calculator weighs the full cost against the earnings table above.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside Sustainability Studies, individual programs post five-year medians far from $62,349 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Western Washington University sits first at $77,312.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $77,312 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 42.4% of the 316 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 $77,312 sits 24% above the national field median of $62,349. Its median debt, $17,212, runs below the field median of $19,000, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.