This report examines how earnings change in the initial years after graduates complete postsecondary credentials. The analysis uses new data from the College Scorecard showing earnings up to five years after students complete their educational programs. It focuses on fields with low initial earnings that are likely to fail earnings-based quality assurance policies tests and fields where students go on to achieve high earnings outside the policy’s measurement window.

Why This Matters

Early efforts to publish data on what former students earn after attending higher education programs focused on the first or second year after students graduated. The availability of later earnings data raises a question for policymakers: When should earnings be measured to best capture whether a program pays off? If earnings are measured too early, fields where earnings are low initially but grow rapidly later could fail earnings-based quality tests, even if they provide value. Measuring later, on the other hand, could overlook the financial hardships graduates might endure during a long low-earning period, even if earnings increase later.

What We Found

• Students completing bachelor’s degrees have the highest earnings growth between the first and fifth years among all credential levels, except for professional degrees in medicine and law. Earnings typically increase by about $20,000 in real terms for these graduates. Some large bachelor’s degree fields with low initial earnings, such as biology, produce even higher earnings growth, as much as $30,000.
• Some large fields among certificates and associate’s degrees, such as those in liberal arts and general studies, produce low initial earnings but high earnings growth over the first five years, with earnings increasing from $28,000 to $42,000 in real terms.
• Fields that industry representatives argue have significant earnings gains in the fourth and fifth years, such as certificates in cosmetology and master’s degrees in social work and clinical psychology, show some of the lowest earnings gains within their credential groups. There is nothing exceptional about the earnings growth for these fields that would merit special policies.
• Quality assurance policies based on graduates’ earnings might need to assess bachelor’s degree earnings later than what has typically been proposed to account for high earnings growth. This is also the case for medicine and law degrees, where earning potential increases significantly but after the first few years postcompletion. Quality assurance policies that would measure earnings for undergraduate certificates and associate’s degrees in the first or second year after students graduate, as some have proposed, could penalize several large fields with high earnings growth in later years.
• The high earnings growth some fields experience might be partly because of graduates going on to pursue further credentials. Policymakers need to consider how such factors should be treated in quality assurance rules and consumer disclosures.

How We Did It

We use College Scorecard data to identify fields that have a high chance of missing an earnings threshold in the first year after students complete their program. Under that test, median earnings of a program’s graduates must exceed median earnings of workers with only a high school diploma. We do the same for master’s degree programs, but students’ median earnings must instead exceed those of workers with only a bachelor’s degree to pass the test. We then group these at-risk programs according to whether they have high or low earnings growth between the first and fifth years after students complete credentials.