Graduates earn a median $29,882 two years after finishing, more than 22% of bachelor's majors. Measured across 129 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 Oklahoma-Norman Campus | not published | $44,649 | not published | — |
| 2 | University of Oklahoma-Health Sciences Center | not published | $44,649 | not published | 9 |
| 3 | Russell Sage College | not published | $39,153 | not published | 5 |
| 4 | College of Saint Benedict cost & debt at this university → | $29,764 | $38,906 | $47,379 | 11 |
| 5 | North Carolina State University at Raleigh | $30,421 | $36,992 | $48,807 | 89 |
| 6 | University of Vermont cost & debt at this university → | $34,168 | $36,488 | $46,376 | 41 |
| 7 | University of Cincinnati-Main Campus cost & debt at this university → | $39,231 | $35,416 | $45,300 | 2 |
| 8 | Central Washington University cost & debt at this university → | $30,834 | $35,274 | $44,724 | — |
| 9 | University of Minnesota-Twin Cities | $32,818 | $34,603 | $45,494 | 52 |
| 10 | University of the Incarnate Word cost & debt at this university → | not published | $33,993 | not published | 12 |
| 11 | Southern Illinois University-Carbondale cost & debt at this university → | $22,761 | $33,281 | $37,893 | 10 |
| 12 | University of Wisconsin-Madison cost & debt at this university → | $28,232 | $32,925 | $51,940 | 64 |
Two medians are worth separating. $29,882 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $30,699 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 Nutrition Sciences sits below the middle by $6,615.
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.
Whatever the subject pays, the money you do not borrow is the money you keep.
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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.