Graduates earn a median $32,284 two years after finishing, more than 25% of bachelor's majors. Measured across 826 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 | Columbia Southern University cost & debt at this university → | $60,105 | $62,260 | $59,697 | 61 |
| 2 | Yale University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $60,161 | not published | 27 |
| 3 | California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo cost & debt at this university → | not published | $59,124 | $65,447 | — |
| 4 | University of Maryland Global Campus | $48,910 | $56,234 | $60,431 | 74 |
| 5 | University of Houston-Clear Lake | $58,690 | $52,107 | not published | 10 |
| 6 | California State University-East Bay | $39,625 | $52,107 | $52,810 | 11 |
| 7 | Massachusetts Maritime Academy | $45,730 | $50,231 | $55,903 | 30 |
| 8 | Bucknell University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $48,041 | not published | 27 |
| 9 | San Jose State University cost & debt at this university → | $42,783 | $48,041 | $66,730 | 65 |
| 10 | University of California-Berkeley cost & debt at this university → | $41,250 | $46,673 | $61,273 | 464 |
| 11 | Colgate University cost & debt at this university → | not published | $44,942 | not published | 38 |
| 12 | Drexel University cost & debt at this university → | $22,921 | $44,170 | $48,700 | 30 |
Two medians are worth separating. $32,284 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $31,364 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 Natural Resources and Conservation sits below the middle by $4,213.
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 Natural Resources Conservation and Research (CIP 0301). 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.