Skip to content
College Ledger

unitid 171100 · East Lansing, MI · public 4-year · city (small)

Michigan State University

Public university in East Lansing, Michigan, US

founded
1855
enrollment 2023
54,390
predominant degree
Bachelor's
website
msu.edu/
Campus of Michigan State University

No machine-readable author provided. Lovelac7~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0

Michigan State University is a public land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the first of its kind in the country. After the introduction of the Morrill Act in 1862, the state designated the college a land-grant institution in 1863, making it the first of the land-grant colleges in the United States. The college became coeducational in 1870. Michigan State has facilities across the state, and over 550,500 alumni. wikipedia rev 1363473298 ↗

scorecard 2026-06 · percentiles within public 4-years

The record

admission rate

85%

53rd pctl among public 4-years

undergraduates

40,922

98th pctl among public 4-years

Pell share

20%

undergrads on Pell grants

17th pctl among public 4-years

completion

81%

finish within 150% time

95th pctl among public 4-years

sticker cost / yr

$32,198

92nd pctl among public 4-years

avg net price / yr

$19,680

after aid, aided students

90th pctl among public 4-years

median earnings, 10 yr

$67,253

after entry, Title IV students

88th pctl among public 4-years

median grad debt

$23,250

81st pctl among public 4-years

what families actually pay

Cost

Sticker price is a fiction for most families — net price is what aided students pay after grants, by family income.

Average net price by family income, 2023–24 aid cohort

Families earning under $30k paid $7,068 per year after aid.

Dashed hollow marks are privacy-suppressed brackets — not zero. Band: middle half of public 4-years (all incomes).

Who enrolls, by family income

  • 0-30k
    23%
  • 30-48k
    11%
  • 48-75k
    13%
  • 75-110k
    not reported
  • 110k+
    not reported
Median family income
$70,982
First-generation students
21%
In-state tuition & fees
$16,458

earnings · debt · programs

Outcomes

Median earnings after entry, working grads with federal aid

Ten years out, the median graduate earns 2.9× the median graduate debt.

Earnings cover federally aided (Title IV) students only.

What programs pay — top fields of study

programgradsearn 5 yrdebt
Biology, General.516$66,211$26,849
Psychology, General.496$56,392$25,250
Medicine.463$208,932—
Business Administration, Management and Operations.448$90,299$23,250
Public Relations, Advertising, and Applied Communication.444$71,448$23,899
Computer and Information Sciences, General.372$105,539$24,022
Finance and Financial Management Services.350$99,263$23,250
Communication and Media Studies.348$66,407$26,750
Sports, Kinesiology, and Physical Education/Fitness.298$68,711$26,000
Mechanical Engineering.279$99,381$24,000
Economics.274$81,373$24,250
Marketing.255$88,000$23,896

— is privacy suppression at small programs, never zero. Earnings are median, 5 years after completing.

annual scorecard files, 1996–2026

Trajectory

Line breaks are years where the measure wasn't collected — a gap is not a zero.

Admission rate

Price per year

  • sticker
  • net

Median earnings, 10 yrs after entry

Undergraduates

wikidata · 5,542 people recorded

Memory

Wikidata is not an alumni census: a person appears only when volunteer editors record them. Counts measure the archive's memory - access x achievement x documentation - never placement rates or institutional quality.

Field fingerprint — share of recorded alumni by field

Women among recorded alumni, by birth decade

People without a recorded gender are excluded; decades with fewer than 5 recorded alumni are dropped.

Wikipedia attention

monthly article views since 2015

most recorded occupationsresearcher (1,766) · basketball player (560) · university teacher (459) · American football player (386) · politician (258) · writer (125) · mathematician (101) · economist (98)

Nobel laureates who studied here

  • Alfred Hershey Medicine 1969

The portrait wall

Sized by nothing, ordered by Wikipedia footprint (language editions).

nearest neighbors in sector

Compare with peers

built 2026-07-17

Provenance

  • U.S. Dept. of Education College Scorecard, 2026-06 release. Earnings cover federally aided (Title IV) students only. Suppressed values are null, never imputed.
  • Annual Scorecard files 1996-2026. A null in early years usually means the measure was not yet collected, not zero.
  • Coordinates and locale describe the campus address, not where students live.
  • Wikidata is not an alumni census: a person appears only when volunteer editors record them. Counts measure the archive's memory - access x achievement x documentation - never placement rates or institutional quality.
  • Images are from Wikimedia Commons under free licenses. Render the credit line (artist + license) with every image.
  • Lead text from Wikipedia (revision 1363473298), CC BY-SA 4.0.