$80,281 at the top, $43,716 at the bottom, and the debt barely moves across all six fields

The ranking

Six creative fields, ranked by median earnings four years after completing, with median debt at completion set beside them.

The spread from top to bottom is $36,565. That is the whole argument of this article in one number. A graduate of the median tech program earns $80,281 four years after completing. A graduate of the median audio and music program earns $43,716. Both borrowed roughly the same amount to get there.

These are medians of program-level medians from the College Scorecard's field-of-study file, matched to institutions in IPEDS. Earnings are measured four years after completing. Debt is the median federal loan balance at completion, not the balance today. The six fields are large: 8,552 tech programs at 2,660 institutions, 6,898 marketing programs at 2,516, then Audio and Music at 2,256 programs, Design at 2,243, Film and Video at 1,499, and Game Design at 514 programs across 284 institutions.

Debt is flat, earnings aren't

Read the debt column on its own and the six fields look interchangeable. Tech graduates finish with a median of $22,780. Game Design graduates finish with $26,000. Every other field sits between those two figures. Nothing in that column tells you which degree pays.

That flatness is not evidence that the fields cost the same. In-state tuition at the median program is $14,624 in Tech and $16,033 in Marketing. Across the four creative fields it runs from $24,295 in Audio and Music Production to $27,530 in Game Design and $27,992 in Design and Digital Art. A design student pays close to twice what a computer science student pays and leaves with a debt figure within a few thousand dollars of it.

The reason is that federal undergraduate borrowing is capped. Most students hit a ceiling well before their bill is covered, and the rest is paid by grants, family money, work, or private loans the federal file does not record. So the debt column compresses toward a common limit while the earnings column stays free to spread. When two things cost differently but borrow the same, the difference has been paid somewhere the data cannot show you.

The practical effect: the ratio column does all the work. Debt at completion as a share of one year's earnings runs from 28% in Tech to 58% in Audio and Music. That is the same debt against half the income.

The two fields where the debt sits worst against the earnings

Audio and Music Production is the worst of the six on both halves of the trade. It has the lowest median earnings, $43,716, and the second-highest median debt, $25,496 — a ratio of 58%. Game Design carries the highest debt of any field in the table, $26,000, against $48,144 in earnings, for 54%.

Design and Digital Art at 51% and Film and Video at 50% are barely better, and nobody should read those numbers as a pass. Four of the six fields leave the median graduate owing more than half a year's earnings at the point they finish. Only Tech at 28% and Marketing at 36% land somewhere a standard repayment schedule absorbs without reorganizing a life around it.

The master's numbers are where this stops being a matter of degree. A film and video master's reports median debt of $61,500 against median earnings of $59,583 — 103%, the only credential in any of the six fields where debt at completion exceeds a full year of earnings. An audio and music master's reports $39,837 in debt against $47,885 in earnings, or 83%. For comparison, a tech master's reports $127,221 in earnings against $38,939 in debt.

What the ranking hides

Three things, and the first is credential mix. Each field median blends certificates, associate degrees, bachelor's degrees and master's degrees, and those diverge hard. A tech undergraduate certificate reports median earnings of $54,917 and a tech associate degree $56,083 — both above the median bachelor's in every creative field on this list. A tech bachelor's reports $88,490. An audio and music bachelor's reports $43,777. The gap between fields is wider than the gap between credentials inside most of them, but not inside Tech.

Second, program-level spread swamps the field medians. A computer science bachelor's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports $225,141 in earnings against $11,077 in debt, a ratio of 5%. A master's at the American Film Institute Conservatory reports $164,727 in debt against $43,012 in earnings, a ratio of 383%. The master's in cinematography and film/video production at New York University reports $168,162 against $47,221, or 356%. The online animation master's at Savannah College of Art and Design reports $99,295 against $51,962, or 191%. No field median protects you from choosing badly inside a field, and no field median stops a good program from beating it.

Third, coverage is thin, and thinner where the fields are small. Only 21% of audio and music programs report earnings — 468 of 2,256. In Game Design it is 25%, which comes to 128 programs reporting earnings and 90 reporting debt. Tech is 22%, though that still means 1,872 programs. Marketing is the exception at 51%, or 3,489 programs. A field median built on 128 programs moves when a handful of them report; the Game Design master's figure of $87,998 rests on seven reporting programs and should be treated as a rumor rather than a finding.

The ranking is also a median of programs, not a median of graduates. It gives a program with forty completers the same weight as one with four hundred. The national all-completer figure for Tech is $62,283, against $80,281 for the median program — a large gap, because tech enrollment is concentrated in places that pay less than the selective programs pulling the median up. Marketing runs the other way: $68,257 nationally against $66,349 at the median program.

One more limit, stated once. These figures cover people who completed a program and took federal aid. They exclude bootcamps and every other non-degree route into these jobs, they say nothing about students who started and did not finish, and they cannot separate a salary from a year of freelance and contract work stitched together. That is a real limit on what the file can tell you. It is not a reason to read $43,716 as a floor that lifts on its own.

How to use it

The ranking is a starting filter, not a verdict. Nobody enrolls in a field median. Use it to set your expectations for a field, then drop immediately to the program level, because the spread inside every one of these fields is wider than the distance between them.

Three checks do most of the work. Look at the credential you would actually earn, not the field average — a master's changes the debt figure far more than it changes the earnings figure in four of these six fields. Look at whether the specific program reports earnings at all; most do not, and a program with no reported figure is a program asking you to take its word. And compare debt at completion to the earnings figure directly, as a share, before you compare anything else.

If tech is the field you are weighing, the tech and development hub carries the field summary, program cost has tuition and debt by credential, and best value ranks programs by what they charge against what their graduates earn. The program finder filters all 8,552 by credential, state and delivery. If you are still deciding whether any of this is worth borrowing for, is it worth it works through the same arithmetic on a single program.

We publish these figures from federal data, and no school pays to appear in them. When you have a shortlist, you can ask a school about a program — cost, aid, and what its own completers report. Underlying files are public at collegescorecard.ed.gov if you want to check the numbers yourself.