Changing pathways to success for young people and how some high schoolers might be getting there

The two articles excerpted here were both in the May 8 print edition of The Wall Street Journal. Over supply of lawyers is holding down their salaries while shortages of workers in skilled trades are raising incomes for those who don't go to college. There are also links to many related posts on whether or not college pays off. Not always and choice of major is important.

See How the Highest-Earning Millennials Made It to the Top of Their Generation: They were part of a vast economic re-sorting that narrowed the paths to financial success, with tech and finance gaining ground on doctors and lawyers by Joe Pinsker and Paul Overberg of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"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."

"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"

"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"

"The top 5% of millennial households by income brought in more than $300,000 in 2023"

"Comparable boomer households in 1990 made more than $212,000 in 2023 dollars."

"28 to 44 years old . . . millennials have higher average net worths than boomers and Generation X did at similar ages, adjusting for inflation."

"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"

"Two-fifths of millennial doctors reach that level [top 5%], 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" 

"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."

See also The High-School Juniors With $70,000-a-Year Job Offers: Companies with shortages of skilled workers look to shop class to recruit future hires; ‘like I’m an athlete getting all this attention from all these pro teams’ by Te-Ping Chen of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Increased efforts to recruit high-schoolers into professions such as plumbing, electrical work and welding have helped spur a revitalization of shop classes in many districts. More businesses are teaming up with high schools to enable students to work part-time, earning money as well as academic credit. More employers are showing up at high school career days and turning to creative recruiting strategies, as well." 

"Employers say that as the skilled trades become more tech-infused, they anticipate doing even more recruitment at an early age, because they need workers who are comfortable programming and running computer diagnostics."

"A decade ago, administrators often snubbed employers in the skilled trades who tried to get a table at a high school career fair"

"Constellation Energy, an operator of U.S. nuclear power plants based in Baltimore, offers maintenance technician and equipment-operator roles that are open to high-school graduates without four-year college degrees, and pay as much as six figures."

"“The idea of growing your own talent has gotten more critical in recent years, when you have fewer and fewer people going into this industry,” he says. At his shop, fresh high-school graduates can make around $50,000 a year, he says, and six figures within five years, without college debt.

For years, the pendulum swung too far in the direction of a college-for-all mindset, and it’s important to make sure students are made aware of all their options, says Steve Klein, a researcher who focuses on vocational education at the nonprofit Education Northwest. At the same time, as interest in vocational education rises, he worries that sentiment runs the risk of swinging too much in the other direction."

Related posts:

Do Liberal Arts Colleges Pay Off? What the Data Say (2024) 

The Top U.S. Colleges That Make New Graduates Rich (2024) 

Is College Worth It? (2024) (Interesting tool created by FREOPP. It allows you to find out your return on investment (ROI) from going to college. You can choose a school and a major and it will tell you your ROI.)

When it comes to lifetime earnings, the most important decision appears to be the choice of college major (2024)

Studying Economics Increases Wages a Lot (2020)

What College Majors Pay The Highest? (2013)

50 College Majors With the Best Return on Investment (2015)

Will Studying Economics Make You Rich? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of the Returns to College Major  (2023)

Why do employers pay extra money to people who study a bunch of subjects in college that they don’t actually need you to know? Signaling (2020)

Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital (2022) 

Yes, a College Degree Is Still Worth It (2023)

Does It Pay To Go To College? (2009)

Maybe That College Degree Is Not As Valuable As You Thought (2010)

Is College Still A Good Investment? (2012)

For Some Grads, College Isn't Worth Debt (2014)

The Diminishing Returns of a College Degree: In the mid-1970s, far less than 1% of taxi drivers were graduates. By 2010 more than 15% were (2017)

The Diminishing Returns of a College Degree (2017) 

Many college dropouts are worse off economically than if they hadn’t started college (2019)

College Still Pays Off, but Not for Everyone (2019)

How Bad Is China’s Economy? The Data Needed to Answer Is Vanishing

Beijing has stopped publishing hundreds of statistics, making it harder to know what’s going on in the country

By Rebecca Feng and Jason Douglas of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Official figures put GDP growth at 5% last year and 5.2% in 2023, but some have estimated that Beijing overstated its numbers by as much as 2 to 3 percentage points. 

To get what they consider to be more realistic assessments of China’s growth, economists have turned to alternative sources such as movie box office revenues, satellite data on the intensity of nighttime lights, the operating rates of cement factories and electricity generation by major power companies. Some parse location data from mapping services run by private companies such as Chinese tech giant Baidu to gauge business activity. 

One economist said he has been assessing the health of China’s services sector by counting news stories about owners of gyms and beauty salons who abruptly close up and skip town with users’ membership fees."

"Former Chinese premier Li Keqiang famously told the U.S. ambassador in 2007 that GDP data for a Chinese province he governed at the time were “man-made” and therefore unreliable, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable."

"China’s official GDP growth of 5% in 2024 exactly matched the target the government had set the previous year."

"In December, a prominent Chinese economist at state-owned SDIC Securities, Gao Shanwen, said at a conference in Washington that China’s economic growth “might be around 2%” the past few years, adding, “we do not know the true number of China’s real growth figure.” 

China’s leader Xi Jinping ordered that Gao be disciplined and he has been banned from speaking publicly for an unspecified period."

"In February, Goldman Sachs came up with an alternative way of measuring China’s economic growth by crunching figures such as import data, which can be read as proxies for domestic spending. The thinking was that trade data get published frequently and is hard to fudge, since China’s trading partners also report those numbers. 

That approach implied that China’s growth in 2024 averaged 3.7%. Using a different method, Rhodium Group, a New York-based research outfit, said growth was closer to 2.4% in 2024."

"Often, the data that goes missing involves areas of high sensitivity or headaches for Beijing, such as the property market"

"a Chinese think tank called Beike Research Institute released a report in 2022 that found the average housing vacancy rate among 28 Chinese cities was higher than the average in the U.S. and other places"

"A few days later, Beike retracted the report and apologized"

"In the mid-2000s, an economist named Yi Fuxian questioned the accuracy of China’s population data and argued that tuberculosis vaccinations were a better measure of population growth because every newborn in China is required to be vaccinated.

In 2020, 5.4 million such vaccines were administered, according to data compiled by the private Chinese think tank Forward Business and Intelligence. Chinese authorities said the country recorded 12.1 million births that year.

A year later, the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control discontinued the weekly data release of tuberculosis vaccines administered, along with other vaccine data."

Related post:

Why is the youth unemployment rate in China 20.4%? Is it structural unemployment or cyclical unemployment? (2023)

The Seasonally Adjusted CPI Was Up 0.22% In April

Here are the changes in the seasonally adjusted CPI each of the last six months:

Nov  0.2805%

Dec  0.3647% 

Jan  0.4669%

Feb 0.2160%

Mar -0.0500%

April 0.2209%

 

The last decline before March 2025 was June 2024 when it was down 0.0029%.

 

See Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) compiled by the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis for data on the seasonally adjusted CPI.

 

That site shows a graph but if you click on the Download button you will get the actual numbers in Microsoft Excel.

 

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average (CPIAUCSL) was 320.321 in April and 319.615 in Mar. Since 320.321/319.615 = 1.0022, that means it was up 0.22%. If we had that every month for 12 months it would be up 2.68%.

 

It was 313.016 in April 2024. Since 320.321/313.016 = 1.0233, that means it was up 2.33% over the last 12 months.  

The non-seasonally adjusted CPI was 320.795 in April and 313.548 in April 2024. That was up 2.31%. So pretty close to the seasonally adjusted CPI. This is still above the Fed's target of 2.0% (although they prefer to use the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index which was 2.3% higher in Mar. 2025 than Mar. 2024).

For more information, see Annual inflation rate hit 2.3% in April, less than expected and lowest since 2021 by Jeff Cox of CNBC. Excerpts:

"The consumer price index, which measures the costs for a broad range of goods and services, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.2% for the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 2.3%, its lowest since February 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. The monthly reading was in line with the Dow Jones consensus estimate while the 12-month was a bit below the forecast for 2.4%.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, the core CPI also increased 0.2% for the month, while the year-over-year level was 2.8%. The forecast was for 0.3% and 2.8%, respectively."

The article also discusses what types of products are going up in price and what is going down. There is a graph of the monthly year-over-year percent change in prices and core prices going back almost 4 years.

 

Other related links:

 

Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items Less Food and Energy in U.S. City Average (CPILFESL) This is also from from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), compiled by the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It has the seasonally adjusted core CPI.

 

Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2025

 

Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index 

 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics makes seasonal adjustments. See Consumer Price Index Summary.

 

The table below has the annual inflation rate since 1914 in the columns labeled CPI %Ch. or CPI percentage change. It is from Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2025 and is not seasonally adjusted. It is also the December to December change in the CPI. That site also looks at how the 12 month average for the CPI changed from one year to the next.

 

Year	CPI %Ch.		Year	CPI %Ch.		Year	CPI %Ch.		Year	CPI %Ch.
1914	1.0		1944	2.3		1974	12.3		2004	3.3
1915	2.0		1945	2.2		1975	6.9		2005	3.4
1916	12.6		1946	18.1		1976	4.9		2006	2.5
1917	18.1		1947	8.8		1977	6.7		2007	4.1
1918	20.4		1948	3.0		1978	9.0		2008	0.1
1919	14.5		1949	-2.1		1979	13.3		2009	2.7
1920	2.6		1950	5.9		1980	12.5		2010	1.5
1921	-10.8		1951	6.0		1981	8.9		2011	3.0
1922	-2.3		1952	0.8		1982	3.8		2012	1.7
1923	2.4		1953	0.7		1983	3.8		2013	1.5
1924	0.0		1954	-0.7		1984	3.9		2014	0.8
1925	3.5		1955	0.4		1985	3.8		2015	0.7
1926	-1.1		1956	3.0		1986	1.1		2016	2.1
1927	-2.3		1957	2.9		1987	4.4		2017	2.1
1928	-1.2		1958	1.8		1988	4.4		2018	1.9
1929	0.6		1959	1.7		1989	4.6		2019	2.3
1930	-6.4		1960	1.4		1990	6.1		2020	1.4
1931	-9.3		1961	0.7		1991	3.1		2021	7.0
1932	-10.3		1962	1.3		1992	2.9		2022	6.5
1933	0.8		1963	1.6		1993	2.7		2023	3.4
1934	1.5		1964	1.0		1994	2.7		2024	2.9
1935	3.0		1965	1.9		1995	2.5
1936	1.4		1966	3.5		1996	3.3
1937	2.9		1967	3.0		1997	1.7
1938	-2.8		1968	4.7		1998	1.6
1939	0.0		1969	6.2		1999	2.7
1940	0.7		1970	5.6		2000	3.4
1941	9.9		1971	3.3		2001	1.6
1942	9.0		1972	3.4		2002	2.4
1943	3.0		1973	8.7		2003	1.9