Graduates earn a median $31,848 two years after finishing, more than 33% of bachelor's majors. Measured across 707 US programmes by the Department of Education — real graduate pay, not survey answers.
Financially it is a slower start than most majors at this level — worth planning your borrowing around.
| # | University | 1 yr out | 2 yrs out | 3 yrs out | Graduates/yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Detroit Mercy cost & debt at this university → | not published | $48,432 | not published | 6 |
| 2 | University of San Diego cost & debt at this university → | $38,981 | $45,383 | $62,179 | 25 |
| 3 | Lebanon Valley College cost & debt at this university → | not published | $44,942 | not published | 7 |
| 4 | Northeastern University | $48,487 | $44,933 | $63,608 | 88 |
| 5 | San Francisco State University cost & debt at this university → | $36,024 | $44,276 | $51,709 | 40 |
| 6 | Miami University-Oxford | $34,610 | $42,682 | not published | 39 |
| 7 | University of New Hampshire-Main Campus | $43,279 | $42,682 | $55,004 | 25 |
| 8 | North Carolina State University at Raleigh | $36,488 | $42,123 | $54,470 | 59 |
| 9 | Colgate University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $42,123 | not published | 54 |
| 10 | California State University-San Marcos cost & debt at this university → | $46,580 | $41,937 | not published | 36 |
| 11 | Mount Saint Mary's University | not published | $41,565 | not published | 6 |
| 12 | Vassar College cost & debt at this university → | $32,713 | $41,025 | not published | 39 |
Two medians are worth separating. $31,848 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $32,515 is what the typical programme reports, counting a class of twenty the same as a class of two thousand. The weighted figure is lower here, which means the larger programmes in this field pay less than the small ones.
It is the median of what real graduates of this exact major earned, taken from tax records two years after they completed. It is not a starting salary, not an average of job adverts, and not a projection. The median bachelor's major in this dataset reports $36,497, so Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology sits below the middle by $4,649.
Two years is early in a career. Fields with long training pipelines — medicine, law, research — look weaker at this point than they will at ten, while trades and applied technical fields peak sooner. Read a low figure in a long-pipeline subject as "slow start", not "bad degree".
There is no debt figure here on purpose. The Department of Education publishes earnings by field of study but not borrowing, so nobody can honestly tell you the debt of a specific major. Debt is published per institution — that is where our university cost pages carry it.
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Source: US Department of Education College Scorecard, field-of-study earnings (median earnings of graduates who received federal financial aid, measured 1–3 years after completion). Figures are per major and credential level, pooled across US programmes. Information only, not financial advice.