Graduates earn a median $35,416 two years after finishing, more than 7% of master's majors. Measured across 469 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 | Medical College of Wisconsin | not published | $223,678 | not published | — |
| 2 | University of Wisconsin-La Crosse | not published | $171,020 | $177,771 | 18 |
| 3 | San Francisco State University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $76,460 | not published | 58 |
| 4 | St. John's University-New York | not published | $60,161 | not published | 18 |
| 5 | Stony Brook University | $33,310 | $58,673 | not published | 54 |
| 6 | University of Maryland-College Park cost & debt at this university → | not published | $58,673 | not published | 4 |
| 7 | University of Toledo cost & debt at this university → | $65,635 | $56,563 | not published | 55 |
| 8 | California State University-Sacramento cost & debt at this university → | $47,269 | $54,435 | not published | 9 |
| 9 | The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley cost & debt at this university → | not published | $53,697 | not published | 43 |
| 10 | University of Massachusetts-Lowell cost & debt at this university → | $62,654 | $52,107 | not published | 19 |
| 11 | George Mason University cost & debt at this university → | $57,415 | $50,856 | not published | 51 |
| 12 | East Texas A&M University | $56,071 | $50,856 | not published | 28 |
Two medians are worth separating. $35,416 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $38,289 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 master's major in this dataset reports $52,837, so Biology sits below the middle by $17,421.
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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Classified by the Department of Education as Biology, General (CIP 2601). 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.