Graduates earn a median $48,971 two years after finishing, more than 39% of master's majors. Measured across 673 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 | California State University-Los Angeles cost & debt at this university → | $81,004 | $74,367 | $80,425 | 95 |
| 2 | California State University-Long Beach cost & debt at this university → | $67,171 | $71,575 | not published | 27 |
| 3 | CUNY Brooklyn College | $67,998 | $69,050 | $75,285 | 127 |
| 4 | St. John's University-New York | $68,426 | $67,789 | $71,827 | 60 |
| 5 | California State University-Dominguez Hills cost & debt at this university → | $65,913 | $67,324 | $73,823 | 9 |
| 6 | CUNY Lehman College | $66,954 | $67,273 | $70,248 | 168 |
| 7 | Pace University cost & debt at this university → | $67,364 | $67,240 | $69,780 | 186 |
| 8 | California State University-San Marcos cost & debt at this university → | not published | $66,941 | $72,765 | 19 |
| 9 | California State University-Fullerton cost & debt at this university → | $66,000 | $66,541 | $68,919 | 38 |
| 10 | CUNY Hunter College | $69,314 | $66,089 | $70,626 | 316 |
| 11 | Long Island University cost & debt at this university → | $67,967 | $65,450 | $67,138 | 89 |
| 12 | CUNY City College | $71,049 | $65,170 | $70,644 | 41 |
Two medians are worth separating. $48,971 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $48,685 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 master's major in this dataset reports $52,837, so Special Education sits below the middle by $3,866.
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 Special Education and Teaching (CIP 1310). 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.