undergradly.

Outcomes

Earnings trajectory

Earnings across the first decade (P25 / median / P75)

Census PSEO, bachelor's degree recipients, graduating cohort 0000 (85,854 graduates). Each point is one published percentile, not an average across fields.

Median earnings · 10yr
$69,954
Cost-adjusted: $69,193
Median debt (completers)
$20,093
Debt/earnings ratio: 0.29
3-yr default rate
0.0%
Borrowers who entered repayment in the published cohort year, not current students

College Scorecard. Earnings are measured ten years after entry across students who received federal aid — completers and non-completers alike — not ten years after graduation.

Median earnings reach $69,954 a decade after entry — strong in absolute terms and strong relative to peers. That median masks a wide range, from $48,802 at the 25th percentile to $100,257 at the 75th — what you study matters more than where. Students who finish carry a median of $20,093 in debt. The debt-to-income ratio of 0.29 is comfortable — debt is a small fraction of what graduates earn. Default tells the same story: 0.0% of borrowers default within three years, well under the national rate.

Economic mobility (Opportunity Insights)

Mobility rate
0.7%
Bottom → top quintile
Access Q1
1.9%
% from bottom quintile
Success rate Q1
40.4%
Q1 students reaching Q5

Opportunity Insights, students born 1980–1991 — a track record, not a forecast for today's entering class. The mobility rate is a share of all students (bottom-quintile origin and top-quintile outcome); the success rate is the share of bottom-quintile students alone who reach the top. They answer different questions and the second is always the larger number.

Earnings percentiles by field (Census PSEO)

One row per field and graduating cohort. Rows that share a field are different graduating classes, not repeats.

Field Graduating cohort Years after grad P25 Median P75
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2019 1 $33,527 $47,582 $59,657
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2016 1 $34,022 $46,836 $58,381
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2013 1 $32,581 $45,286 $57,061
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2010 1 $31,793 $43,266 $54,356
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2007 1 $31,112 $43,549 $55,632
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2004 1 $32,070 $44,568 $57,631
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2001 1 $26,814 $39,223 $50,745
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 0000 1 $31,870 $44,678 $56,642
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2016 5 $53,572 $72,183 $92,452
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2013 5 $52,742 $69,975 $90,471
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2010 5 $52,010 $68,780 $86,833
Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09) 2007 5 $50,492 $67,028 $86,434

Census PSEO, bachelor's degree recipients — earnings measured 1, 5 and 10 years after graduation, unlike the Scorecard figures above. The all-fields institution total is published separately and is not one of the rows above. A cohort label covers a pooling window of three or five graduating years, which PSEO does not publish per cell.

Independent ROI ranking

Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce ranked this school #318 of 4,419 US colleges by 40-year return on investment — the net present value of attending after costs.

10-year NPV
$143,000
20-year NPV
$604,000
40-year NPV
$1,292,000

Georgetown University CEW, Ranking 4,500 Colleges by ROI (2022)