Graduates earn a median $29,685 two years after finishing, more than 32% of bachelor's majors. Measured across 159 US programmes by the Department of Education — real graduate pay, not survey answers.
On earnings alone this is among the lowest-paying majors at this level. That does not make it a bad subject, but it does make the debt you take on for it matter more.
| # | University | 1 yr out | 2 yrs out | 3 yrs out | Graduates/yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thomas Edison State University cost & debt at this university → | $49,000 | $50,856 | $55,764 | 69 |
| 2 | Empire State University | $52,259 | $45,852 | $53,584 | — |
| 3 | University of Notre Dame cost & debt at this university → | $40,806 | $40,485 | $58,799 | 61 |
| 4 | University of Northern Iowa cost & debt at this university → | not published | $39,909 | not published | 8 |
| 5 | University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point cost & debt at this university → | not published | $39,009 | not published | 14 |
| 6 | Grand Valley State University cost & debt at this university → | $38,369 | $35,996 | $37,262 | 18 |
| 7 | University of Houston-Downtown cost & debt at this university → | $36,725 | $33,993 | $42,901 | 25 |
| 8 | Indiana University of Pennsylvania cost & debt at this university → | $25,473 | $33,459 | $42,568 | 25 |
| 9 | Washington State University cost & debt at this university → | $34,602 | $33,281 | $39,164 | 28 |
| 10 | CUNY Hunter College | $28,569 | $33,138 | $51,280 | 67 |
| 11 | Pennsylvania State University-World Campus | $33,036 | $32,854 | $41,317 | 1 |
| 12 | Pennsylvania State University-Penn State York | $33,036 | $32,854 | $41,317 | 2 |
Two medians are worth separating. $29,685 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $32,391 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 Biological and Physical Sciences sits below the middle by $6,812.
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.