Ending the year on a good note: Top-earning millennials (28-44) are likely Bay Area lawyers!

WSJ reports top-earning millennials (28-44) “take strikingly similar paths to get there”: they work in “a small number of lucrative fields in a small number of superstar cities after attending a small number of top-tier universities.” To reach this top 5% in pay, law is the career path with the highest probability of getting there, and living in a CA tech hub is the best location for it.

Highlights from the article:

• The household income threshold for the top 5% of millennials was $300,000 in 2023.
• Law is the most likely career path to reach the top 5% income at over 20% likelihood, followed by computer/math, finance, and healthcare, each closer to 10%. (WSJ makes a point to say lawyers are losing ground, however, in this race to the top.)
• More than 20% of top 5% millennials live in CA or WA tech hubs, and SF topped the highest individual median earnings. “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 a Berkeley economist, who says “the importance of where the [top-paid millennials] are, where they start their career and where they pursue their career, has become significantly more important” compared to previous generations.
• This generation “came of age during the 2007-09 recession, which hindered their early career prospects. A few thriving industries helped some of them catch up.” They include tech, science, engineering and finance. “Lucrative jobs in these fields clustered 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… 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.”
• An elite private education rather than a public flagship university increases students’ odds of joining the top 1% of earners by 60%.
• 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.”