Bachelor’s degree · earnings 4 years after completing
Highest-Paying Colleges for Apparel and Textiles (Bachelor's)
Graduates who complete a bachelor's degree in Apparel and Textiles earn a median of $57,640 four years after finishing, and the middle half earn between $40,599 and $75,931. We rank the 37 U.S. colleges whose Apparel and Textiles programs have at least 25 graduates in the Scorecard earnings sample, 2,741 graduates in all. That puts Apparel and Textiles at #74 of 131 bachelor's degree fields we rank by national median earnings.
Indiana University-Bloomington, in Indiana, leads at $77,520, 36% above the median ranked school ($57,124). The gap between schools is moderate: the middle half of ranked schools earn between $51,654 and $63,394, and the lowest earns $38,226. 16 of the 37 ranked schools (43%) match or beat the national median.
Public universities dominate the top 20: 20 public, 0 private nonprofit and 0 for-profit. Across all ranked schools, 92% are public. The top 20 are spread across 18 states, with New York the most common (2).
The top 20 schools cost about the same as the rest of the list: a median net price of $18,973 a year, against $17,799 across all 37 ranked schools. Their graduates who borrowed carry a median of $21,608 in federal loans, about 34% of one year of earnings. Measured against a typical high-school graduate in the same state, the median top-20 school recovers its net cost in about 2.9 years.
Showing the top 37 of 37 ranked schools. Select a column heading to re-sort the table. † = fewer than 40 graduates in the earnings sample.
| 1 | Indiana University-Bloomington Bloomington, IN Public · 4-year | $77,520 | 90 | $19,500 | $16,264 | 1.6 |
| 2 | University of Delaware Newark, DE Public · 4-year | $76,595 | 115 | $22,250 | $17,799 | 1.8 |
| 3 | The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX Public · 4-year | $71,922 | 45 | $21,749 | $19,857 | 2.1 |
| 4 | Fashion Institute of Technology New York, NY Public · 4-year | $71,139 | 81 | $19,500 | $19,095 | 2.2 |
| 5 | Ohio State University-Main Campus Columbus, OH Public · 4-year | $66,256 | 126 | $20,500 | $17,339 | 2.3 |
| 6 | University of Kentucky Lexington, KY Public · 4-year | $66,255 | 61 | $22,612 | $18,851 | 2.4 |
| 7 | Florida State University Tallahassee, FL Public · 4-year | $64,807 | 182 | $17,750 | $11,297 | 1.5 |
| 8 | University of Rhode Island Kingston, RI Public · 4-year | $64,328 | 75 | $23,594 | $21,440 | 3.6 |
| 9 | University of Missouri-Columbia Columbia, MO Public · 4-year | $63,723 | 99 | $24,932 | $20,268 | 2.8 |
| 10 | University of Arkansas Fayetteville, AR Public · 4-year | $63,394 | 81 | $24,775 | $18,209 | 2.4 |
| 11 | Auburn University Auburn, AL Public · 4-year | $62,807 | 54 | $20,500 | $24,323 | 3.2 |
| 12 | Illinois State University Normal, IL Public · 4-year | $62,339 | 42 | $19,375 | $19,398 | 3.0 |
| 13 | SUNY Oneonta Oneonta, NY Public · 4-year | $61,121 | 96 | $21,500 | $19,158 | 3.0 |
| 14 | Iowa State University Ames, IA Public · 4-year | $60,349 | 205 | $21,560 | $18,589 | 3.2 |
| 15 | Ohio University-Main Campus Athens, OH Public · 4-year | $58,647 | 63 | $23,750 | $21,637 | 3.8 |
| 16 | Appalachian State University Boone, NC Public · 4-year | $58,516 | 35 † | $22,700 | $16,836 | 2.8 |
| 17 | Kansas State University Manhattan, KS Public · 4-year | $57,576 | 41 | $21,656 | $19,406 | 3.4 |
| 18 | Colorado State University-Fort Collins Fort Collins, CO Public · 4-year | $57,184 | 72 | $19,563 | $21,279 | 5.2 |
| 19 | Framingham State University Framingham, MA Public · 4-year | $57,124 | 52 | $26,000 | $16,114 | 4.0 |
| 20 | North Dakota State University-Main Campus Fargo, ND Public · 4-year | $56,197 | 42 | $21,500 | $15,543 | 3.2 |
| 21 | East Carolina University Greenville, NC Public · 4-year | $56,134 | 58 | $24,329 | $15,739 | 2.9 |
| 22 | Savannah College of Art and Design Savannah, GA Private nonprofit · 4-year | $55,925 | 137 | $25,666 | $49,430 | 8.9 |
| 23 | Missouri State University-Springfield Springfield, MO Public · 4-year | $54,347 | 68 | $25,510 | $17,613 | 3.6 |
| 24 | The University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL Public · 4-year | $54,254 | 42 | $25,000 | $22,420 | 4.1 |
| 25 | San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA Public · 4-year | $53,575 | 58 | $17,625 | $12,278 | 3.0 |
| 26 | California State Polytechnic University-Pomona Pomona, CA Public · 4-year | $52,952 | 121 | $11,600 | $11,531 | 2.9 |
| 27 | Washington State University Pullman, WA Public · 4-year | $52,765 | 71 | $19,500 | $14,971 | 4.9 |
| 28 | University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, NE Public · 4-year | $51,654 | 36 † | $26,000 | $17,747 | 4.8 |
| 29 | University of North Carolina at Greensboro Greensboro, NC Public · 4-year | $51,510 | 74 | $25,237 | $10,965 | 2.5 |
| 30 | Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Baton Rouge, LA Public · 4-year | $48,603 | 58 | $20,500 | $19,151 | 5.4 |
| 31 | Wayne State University Detroit, MI Public · 4-year | $46,737 | 84 | $22,441 | $12,766 | 4.3 |
| 32 | Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, KY Public · 4-year | $45,420 | 53 | $27,000 | $10,990 | 4.4 |
| 33 | Middle Tennessee State University Murfreesboro, TN Public · 4-year | $45,225 | 30 † | $23,250 | $13,359 | 5.1 |
| 34 | Georgia Southern University Statesboro, GA Public · 4-year | $45,043 | 73 | $25,875 | $15,267 | 5.4 |
| 35 | Southern Illinois University-Carbondale Carbondale, IL Public · 4-year | $43,823 | 33 † | $30,916 | $13,297 | 6.9 |
| 36 | Academy of Art University San Francisco, CA For-profit · 4-year | $41,565 | 45 | $25,500 | $40,613 | 35.4 |
| 37 | Liberty University Lynchburg, VA Private nonprofit · 4-year | $38,226 | 43 | $22,500 | $29,357 | — |
How this ranking is built
A school appears here only if it meets every condition below.
- Which programs count
- Main campuses only, one entry per institution. Scorecard reports program outcomes for the whole six-digit federal ID (OPEID6), so branch campuses share their parent’s numbers and are not listed twice.
- Only bachelor's degree programs in Apparel and Textiles (CIP 1909, the four-digit code Scorecard uses to group related programs).
- At least 25 graduates in the earnings sample. Smaller samples are left out because their medians swing too much and the counts carry a little privacy noise.
- A major gets a page only when at least 20 schools qualify. This one has 37.
- Ranked by median earnings 4 years after completing, highest first. Ties go to the larger sample, then to the school name.
- Schools missing earnings or a sample size are left out rather than estimated.
- What the numbers mean
- Earnings: median annual earnings of graduates four years after completing. The cohort completed in academic years 2017-18 and 2018-19 and was measured in calendar years 2022 and 2023, in 2024 dollars.
- Who is counted: graduates who received federal student aid (Title IV grants or loans), and only those who were working and not enrolled in more school that year. Graduates without federal aid, those who went on to further study and those with no earnings are not in the median.
- Scorecard adds privacy noise to counts and medians and hides values it cannot protect, so a gap of a few percent between two schools is not meaningful.
- Graduates: the number of graduates in that earnings sample. A † marks fewer than 40, where the figure is less precise.
- Debt: median federal loan debt (Stafford and Grad PLUS loans disbursed at that school) of graduates who borrowed, from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 completers. Parent PLUS and private loans are not included.
- Net price: average yearly cost after grants and scholarships for the whole institution, not this major, academic year 2023-24.
- Payback: 4 years of net price divided by how much these earnings exceed a high-school graduate’s in the school’s state. Shown only when that gap is at least $2,000, the same formula as the rest of the site.
- Source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard field-of-study data, June 2026 release.
Top states for Apparel and Textiles earnings
Median of the school medians for states with at least 3 ranked schools. The best school in each state is shown.
| State | Median earnings | Ranked schools | Top school |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Carolina | $56,134 | 3 | Appalachian State University |
| California | $52,952 | 3 | San Francisco State University |
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