How the highest-earning millennials made it to the top of their generation

Millennials who become top earners are taking strikingly similar paths to get there.

They are often working in a small number of lucrative fields in a small number of superstar cities after attending a small number of top-tier universities.

This vast economic re-sorting has given a boost to the fields of tech and finance. Both are more likely to vault millennials into their generation’s top 5% of household incomes, compared with baby boomers at similar ages in 1990, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest Census Bureau data from 2023.

Those ascendant industries have gained ground on doctors and lawyers. Millennials with those jobs are less likely to make it into their generation’s highest earners than their baby boomer counterparts were 35 years ago, according to the Journal’s analysis.

Many millennials find their way to tech jobs, drawn by the financial security they offer.

AJ Debole, 37, went to law school after college at her parents’ encouragement, but couldn’t find work after a year of searching. “Had I known what job prospects would be like when I got out of law school, I never would’ve gone,” she said.

She later got a position at a telecom company, and to supplement her income started trading. She developed an interest in cybersecurity and said she started reading books and watching videos on the subject during her two-hour commute.

That helped her land a tech job paying well enough that her wife could stop working, and with her growing wealth she could hack away at her decade-old law-school loans.

The economy’s re-sorting has come with a big payoff. The top 5% of millennial households by income brought in more than $300,000 in 2023, according to the Journal’s analysis, which used census data archived by IPUMS at the University of Minnesota. Comparable boomer households in 1990 made more than $212,000 in 2023 dollars.

Narrow pathways to success mean instability in just a few industries or cities could be a roadblock for many millennials. The generation, currently 28 to 44 years old, came of age during the 2007-09 recession, which hindered their early career prospects. A few thriving industries helped some of them catch up.

Despite being labeled as financially stunted, millennials have higher average net worths than boomers and Generation X did at similar ages, adjusting for inflation.

Pay grew much faster in higher-wage industries than in lower-wage industries between 1996 and 2018, according to a 2024 study in the American Economic Review. Tech is among the lucrative 5% of fields that accounted for more than half of that difference, along with science, engineering and finance.

“The earnings have just skyrocketed in those industries,” said John Haltiwanger, an economist at the University of Maryland who co-wrote the study.

Millennial software developers and financial analysts are roughly four times as likely to be in their generation’s top-earning 5% of households, compared with millennials overall, per the Journal’s analysis.

Historically, industries such as food preparation and building and grounds maintenance haven’t churned out lots of top earners. But they are now even less likely to, as higher-wage industries have thrived, according to the Journal’s analysis.

Lucrative jobs in the fields Haltiwanger identified tend to be found at a smaller number of thriving companies, clustering at “mega firms” with more than 10,000 employees.

Such positions at globe-spanning businesses can come with more potential upside than working with a single patient or legal client.

“You’re going to a surgeon, and your surgeon is making the same amount as the guy who’s programming the interface at Snapchat,” said Anupam Jena, an economist and physician at Harvard Medical School.

The medical and legal professions’ 100-year run as fairly dependable paths to financial success in the U.S. took off in the early 20th century. Today, millennial doctors and lawyers still have a good chance of making it into their generation’s top echelon of income, but not as good a chance as their boomer counterparts had. Two-fifths of millennial doctors reach that level, compared with half of boomer doctors. Among lawyers, fewer than a third do, compared with 38% among boomers.

For lawyers, the drop-off likely has to do with the supply of law-school graduates overshooting demand for their services, said Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

“Law school was sort of a default career path in many instances for people who really couldn’t think of anything else that they necessarily wanted to do,” Campos said.

Ryan Haugh, 35, sensed the changing economic winds as early as high school. He said he didn’t consider becoming a doctor or lawyer because the educational costs and timeline deterred him.

He grew up in rural Pennsylvania in what he calls “a bad Bruce Springsteen song,” one of five children whose father worked in a factory. His favorite movie was the 1987 hit “Wall Street,” which offered him a road map to financial security: “Get a business-oriented college degree, get to the big city.”

He funded his degree by serving in the Navy, and then pursued management consulting in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The steadiness of the consulting job he has held for the past couple of years has enabled his wife, Caitlin Haugh, to work at a startup with the hope of a big payday. “That’s our golden ticket,” he said. “That’ll be our family’s wealth-generation machine.”

Even those who aren’t as directed as Haugh in college might be by the time they leave. Lauren Rivera, who studies elite firms’ hiring processes as a sociologist at Northwestern University, has noticed anecdotally that her students’ career aspirations are converging.

“The undergrads are laser-focused on this triumvirate of banking, consulting and tech,” she said. “They have all sorts of ideas that they want to do to change the world, and then they end up in these same three places.”

Going to an elite private school rather than a public flagship university increases students’ chances of joining the top 1% of earners by roughly 60%, according to a 2023 study from the research group Opportunity Insights.

In earlier eras, top colleges drew heavily from their own regions. These days, they take top students from anywhere.

“If you lived in Iowa, you were just a very high-scoring student who went to the University of Iowa,” said David Deming, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy School. Now, elite colleges are “grabbing all of the talented students from Iowa and sucking them into the East Coast, the Beltway, or wherever.”

As millennials have settled into their adult lives, more than a fifth of the generation’s top-earning 5% lives in the tech hubs of California or Washington state.

Incomes in a handful of economically vibrant metros including San Francisco and Seattle, as well as New York and Washington, D.C., have pulled away from those in the rest of the country over the past several decades, according to research by Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

For millennials, “the importance of where they are, where they start their career and where they pursue their career, has become significantly more important,” Moretti said.

Though they often end up in similar places, millennial high-earners have more diverse backgrounds than their boomer counterparts did. Some 62% of them are white, versus 86% of boomer high-earners. And they are twice as likely to have been born abroad.

Chirranjeevi Gopal grew up in Chennai, India, and moved to California for graduate school in 2009. A decade later, he left a secure engineering job to found a battery-materials startup in Silicon Valley.

“I never thought twice about leaving my country and moving to a country where I didn’t know anybody,” said Gopal, a 37-year-old in Mountain View, Calif.

The Bay Area has attracted so many skilled workers that Gopal said he is now more likely than his wife, Caitlin Bigelow, to run into childhood acquaintances, even though she is a California native.

Financially successful millennials like Gopal and Bigelow often pair off.

Bigelow, 35, works in marketing. As a kid, she would deliver sales pitches for bottles of salad dressing to her family at dinnertime.

“I was lucky in the sense that the things that I’m good at, society valued,” she said.