Bachelor’s degree · earnings 4 years after completing
Highest-Paying Colleges for Sales and Retail Merchandising (Bachelor's)
Graduates who complete a bachelor's degree in Sales and Retail Merchandising earn a median of $75,399 four years after finishing, and the middle half earn between $51,403 and $102,168. We rank the 21 U.S. colleges whose Sales and Retail Merchandising programs have at least 25 graduates in the Scorecard earnings sample, 2,083 graduates in all. That puts Sales and Retail Merchandising at #35 of 131 bachelor's degree fields we rank by national median earnings.
Baylor University, in Texas, leads at $125,167, 63% above the median ranked school ($76,648). Most schools are tightly bunched: the middle half of ranked schools earn between $70,867 and $82,549, and the lowest earns $58,141, so outside the leaders the choice of school moves earnings less than the choice of major. 13 of the 21 ranked schools (62%) match or beat the national median.
Public universities dominate the top 20: 15 public, 5 private nonprofit and 0 for-profit. Across all ranked schools, 71% are public. The top 20 are spread across 13 states, with Texas the most common (3).
The top 20 schools cost about the same as the rest of the list: a median net price of $17,422 a year, against $17,490 across all 21 ranked schools. Their graduates who borrowed carry a median of $20,865 in federal loans, about 27% 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 1.6 years.
Showing the top 21 of 21 ranked schools. Select a column heading to re-sort the table. † = fewer than 40 graduates in the earnings sample.
| 1 | Baylor University Waco, TX Private nonprofit · 4-year | $125,167 | 26 † | $20,500 | $41,104 | 1.8 |
| 2 | Western Governors University Salt Lake City, UT Private nonprofit · 4-year | $107,585 | 39 † | $20,671 | $12,548 | 0.7 |
| 3 | Bellevue University Bellevue, NE Private nonprofit · 4-year | $98,487 | 27 † | — | $17,550 | 1.1 |
| 4 | Texas A&M University-College Station College Station, TX Public · 4-year | $93,141 | 295 | $20,787 | $21,315 | 1.5 |
| 5 | Bowling Green State University-Main Campus Bowling Green, OH Public · 4-year | $86,245 | 29 † | $25,000 | $24,022 | 1.9 |
| 6 | Weber State University Ogden, UT Public · 4-year | $82,549 | 133 | $17,500 | $10,258 | 0.9 |
| 7 | Purdue University-Main Campus West Lafayette, IN Public · 4-year | $82,441 | 100 | $19,451 | $14,600 | 1.3 |
| 8 | University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI Public · 4-year | $82,081 | 99 | $18,737 | $17,354 | 1.6 |
| 9 | Kennesaw State University Kennesaw, GA Public · 4-year | $79,147 | 27 † | $19,375 | $15,048 | 1.3 |
| 10 | Ball State University Muncie, IN Public · 4-year | $78,401 | 41 | $24,250 | $14,940 | 1.4 |
| 11 | University of Alabama at Birmingham Birmingham, AL Public · 4-year | $76,648 | 33 † | — | $18,749 | 1.7 |
| 12 | CUNY Bernard M Baruch College New York, NY Public · 4-year | $76,565 | 480 | $9,127 | $3,033 | 0.3 |
| 13 | University of Central Oklahoma Edmond, OK Public · 4-year | $75,796 | 32 † | $20,942 | $18,309 | 1.8 |
| 14 | Tuskegee University Tuskegee, AL Private nonprofit · 4-year | $73,435 | 27 † | $27,000 | $35,013 | 3.4 |
| 15 | University of Houston Houston, TX Public · 4-year | $72,199 | 199 | $22,138 | $14,276 | 1.5 |
| 16 | University of Akron Main Campus Akron, OH Public · 4-year | $70,867 | 38 † | $25,750 | $13,946 | 1.6 |
| 17 | University of Hartford West Hartford, CT Private nonprofit · 4-year | $70,124 | 46 | $26,974 | $30,282 | 3.7 |
| 18 | University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Minneapolis, MN Public · 4-year | $68,903 | 142 | $19,500 | $16,778 | 2.2 |
| 19 | University of Wisconsin-Stout Menomonie, WI Public · 4-year | $66,306 | 50 | $23,250 | $17,490 | 2.4 |
| 20 | University of South Carolina-Columbia Columbia, SC Public · 4-year | $64,631 | 156 | $23,250 | $22,811 | 3.1 |
| 21 | Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, NY Private nonprofit · 4-year | $58,141 | 64 | $23,625 | $34,906 | 6.2 |
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 Sales and Retail Merchandising (CIP 5218, 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 21.
- 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 Sales and Retail Merchandising 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | $93,141 | 3 | Baylor University |
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