What Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Levels and Methods Graduates Earn

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

Nothing on this page is a survey response or a recruiter's claim: the $44,402 year-one median and the $48,305 year-five median for Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Levels and Methods come from federal earnings records pooled across 1,258 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (63,203 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

From $44,402 in the first year to $48,305 in the fifth, earnings grow 9% ($3,903). 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.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Levels and Methods are $43,639 (received Pell) and $45,730 (did not), $2,091 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, Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Levels and Methods ranks 5 of 6 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $51,190. Its closest sibling is Educational Administration and Supervision at $46,675, below this field's $48,305. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Levels and Methods stands number 170 by five-year earnings and number 99 by first-year earnings, and number 117 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 53 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $21,540 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 655 programs reporting debt. That is 49% of the first-year median earnings, or about 5.8 months of gross pay at $44,402 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $245 a month and interest adds $7,836 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 Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Levels and Methods, individual programs post five-year medians far from $48,305 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; St. John's University-New York sits first at $76,837.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of St. John's University-New York's counted graduates earn less than $76,837. Weigh any program here against its own price using the net price estimator and 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 55,038 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 $76,837 sits 59% above the national field median of $48,305. Its median debt, $27,000, runs above the field median of $21,540, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.