Engineering diplomas are paying off for millennials.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York examined 73 college major groups using Census Bureau data from 2024. The Fed’s analysis showed 21 majors had six-figure median wages at the mid-career stage, defined as 35- to 45-year-olds.
Many of the top 10 were engineering fields, with chemical, computer, and aerospace studies having the highest median wages.
“Engineering jobs often require rigorous coursework if not a higher degree, and the scarcity of qualified engineers means employers are willing to pay high wages,” Daniel Zhao, the chief economist at Glassdoor, said. “Notably, the engineering field with the lowest mid-career median wage is still in the six-figure range.”
The lowest among the engineering degrees was industrial at $100,000.
The chart below shows the 10 majors with the highest median mid-career pay:
“One of the strongest predictors of high mid-career wages is high early-career wages,” Zhao said. “Getting a leg up early on helps set workers onto a higher earning trajectory for the rest of their career.”
The analysis showed engineering majors ranked highly for early-career wages, too. Computer engineering had the highest early-career median wage, at $90,000, followed by computer science at $87,000.
Being a millennial versus a newcomer in the job market
The New York Fed’s analysis of 35- to 45-year-olds includes a large share of the millennial generation. The data is from 2024, so it doesn’t reflect the most recent job market in 2025, when the US added the fewest jobs over the year since 2003 outside recessions.
Millennials have been around weak job markets before, having “had the fortune to graduate into the 2008 housing crisis, live through the Covid recession and be in the management ranks during the current post-Covid slowdown,” Zhao said. “The job market now is soft, but many of the lessons are the same as previous downturns.”
The US isn’t in a recession, but the job market has been unusually frozen amid still strong gross domestic product growth. Both overall unemployment and layoffs remain fairly low, but some big names are making job cuts, and employers are coming off a year filled with a lot of uncertainty.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed unemployment for 35- to 44-year-olds, regardless of education, has remained low, at 3.3% in February.
The job market tends to be tougher for those without a college degree or those new to the workforce. Many older millennials were just graduating or early in their careers during the Great Recession and its long, slow recovery.
Zhao is optimistic that the job market will still need engineers, although it may be tougher for new engineering majors to find a job quickly, depending on the kind of engineering they studied.
“Engineering skills are going to remain in high demand for years to come, but this will vary over time, with the business cycle, and between engineering fields,” Zhao said.
Zhao said new computer science and engineering graduates are having a rough time landing jobs because hiring in the tech sector has been sluggish.
College grad Andrew Chen experienced this firsthand. Last May, Chen was close to earning his computer science degree from the University of California San Diego. But the excitement of graduation was clouded by the fact that he still hadn’t secured a job. Then Amazon reached out to schedule an interview, and by the time he graduated, he’d accepted a software engineering role with a six-figure salary.
“This was the first big company that had given me a chance in a while,” he said, “so I really wanted to get this one.”
