Graduates earn a median $23,067 two years after finishing, more than 1% of bachelor's majors. Measured across 882 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 | Michigan Technological University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $49,683 | not published | 3 |
| 2 | The University of Texas at Austin cost & debt at this university → | $24,559 | $45,128 | not published | 57 |
| 3 | CUNY New York City College of Technology | $30,591 | $38,829 | $31,693 | 26 |
| 4 | Texas Tech University cost & debt at this university → | $22,176 | $38,289 | $34,726 | 23 |
| 5 | University of Notre Dame cost & debt at this university → | $41,882 | $36,437 | $49,740 | 61 |
| 6 | University of Nevada-Las Vegas cost & debt at this university → | $29,759 | $33,281 | $33,550 | 50 |
| 7 | University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus | $21,688 | $32,925 | $36,136 | — |
| 8 | University of North Carolina School of the Arts | $25,424 | $32,213 | $38,341 | 90 |
| 9 | Sonoma State University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $31,839 | not published | 16 |
| 10 | University of California-Berkeley cost & debt at this university → | $31,067 | $31,839 | not published | 30 |
| 11 | Concordia College at Moorhead cost & debt at this university → | not published | $31,670 | not published | 3 |
| 12 | University of Washington-Seattle Campus | $20,214 | $31,305 | $28,833 | 23 |
Two medians are worth separating. $23,067 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $22,281 is what the typical programme reports, counting a class of twenty the same as a class of two thousand. The weighted figure is higher here, which means the larger programmes in this field are the better-paying 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 Drama & Theatre Arts and Stagecraft sits below the middle by $13,430.
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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Classified by the Department of Education as Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft (CIP 5005). 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.