What Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Subject Areas Graduates Earn

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

For Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Subject Areas, the federal file supports exactly three earnings snapshots, and this page prints all of them: $45,820 one year after graduation, $52,410 at four years, $54,736 at five. The weighting note matters: medians here count graduates, not programs, across 21,815 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 $8,916 between the first and fifth year, a 19% 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.

Scorecard separates the first-year figure by Pell history for this field: $45,243 for graduates who received Pell, $46,783 for those who did not. The $1,540 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, Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Subject Areas ranks 2 of 6 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $51,190. Its closest sibling is Education, Other at $55,658, above this field's $54,736. 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 Subject Areas stands number 142 by five-year earnings and number 86 by first-year earnings, and number 103 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 39 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 293 programs that report debt for Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Subject Areas, the median graduate owes $21,060. Set beside the $45,820 year-one median, the debt is 46% of first-year gross earnings, about 5.5 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $239 monthly and $7,662 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

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 Teacher Education and Professional Development, Specific Subject Areas among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by CUNY Brooklyn College at $81,179, against a national field median of $54,736.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $81,179 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 2.1% of the 21,815 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 $81,179 sits 48% above the national field median of $54,736. Its median debt, $12,875, runs below the field median of $21,060, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.