College graduates on average earn more than those without a four-year degree — but where you go to school may influence your earning potential.

Young men (ages 25 to 34) earned a median annual income of $77,000 in 2023, compared with $45,000 for those in the same age group who only completed high school, Pew Research Center data shows. Young women who graduated college earned $65,000, while their degreeless counterparts earned about $36,000. 

But even bachelor’s degree holders who received identical degrees in the same field of study can earn vastly different salaries depending on which school they attended, according to a new report from salary data provider Payscale. 

Its findings, published on Sept. 4, note that mid-career earnings for the same degree can vary by as much as $130,000. 

For its report, Payscale looked at the education and employment histories of more than 3 million college graduates, then ranked colleges according to alumni’s median salaries in the first five years of their career (“early career pay”) and what alumni with 10 or more years of work experience were earning (“mid-career pay”).

No school’s graduates have better financial prospects than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Payscale found. Former MIT attendees earn a median income of $196,900 a decade after graduating, making them the highest earners among the nearly 1,500 colleges ranked. 

If you want to get the most bang for your buck out of college, consider these 10 schools that yield the highest salaries for graduates, according to Payscale:

• Early career pay: $110,200
• Mid-career pay: $196,900

• Early career pay: $95,600
• Mid-career pay: $194,100

• Early career pay: $96,700
• Mid-career pay: $187,800

• Early career pay: $115,000
• Mid-career pay: $185,900

• Early career pay: $90,600
• Mid-career pay: $181,400

• Early career pay: $102,300
• Mid-career pay: $181,200

• Early career pay: $91,000
• Mid-career pay: $179,500

• Early career pay: $92,300
• Mid-career pay: $178,700

• Early career pay: $92,500
• Mid-career pay: $178,300

• Early career pay: $95,600
• Mid-career pay: $177,400

Four Ivy League schools — Dartmouth College, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University — made the top 10. 

While Ivy League alumni frequently go on to land high-paying jobs or launch their own businesses, data is inconclusive as to whether attending one of these elite institutions has a tangible impact on future career earnings.

In fact, one 2023 study by a group of Harvard and Brown University-based economists found that attending an Ivy League college has a “statistically insignificant impact” on earnings.

Beyond the Ivies, colleges and universities with robust STEM programs finished strong: MIT claimed the top spot on Payscale’s ranking, The United States Naval Academy landed third, Harvey Mudd College fourth and the California Institute of Technology 13th.

Of course, the field you major in and the job you can get after college can also affect your income.

Students who choose to study science, engineering and mathematics generally outearn those who study liberal arts after graduation, Payscale found. Petroleum engineering is the highest-paying major overall, with graduates in that field earning an average $212,000 after working for 10 or more years.

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Like a lot of hiring managers, Adriane Schwager likes to ask candidates about times in their career they’ve made a mistake. Usually, it’s to get an idea of how you handle stressful situations and how you learn from previous errors.

For Schwager, the CEO and co-founder of the hiring platform GrowthAssistant with 20 years of recruiting experience, the answer can uncover a big red flag: whether the person has low ownership of their work.

In listening to the response, Schwager tells CNBC Make It that she tries to assess whether the person can own up to the mistake, or if it seems like they’re making it out to be someone else’s fault.

Take an example where someone forgot to send something important to accounting, and it cost the business $250,000, she says. If the candidate discusses how the accident was the result of someone else not sending them the right information, or their manager not helping to provide oversight, “and it turns into someone else’s fault, that shows me they have low ownership,” Schwager says.

On the other hand, she says, a better response might be: “I didn’t send something to accounting once and it cost us $250,000. I thought I was going to lose my job. So I immediately created a calendar reminder so that I send that to accounting every Tuesday.”

“I believe that all situations are co-created, and we all play a part in some of this failure,” Schwager says. “A company fails, your department fails — even if you aren’t running that department, you still played a part in it. That doesn’t make you good or bad. It just is. So be aware of your participation in that outcome, and be able to talk about the learning you had from it.”

Ultimately, Schwager says, “I need somebody who is that aware of how they participated in the outcome.”

Sometimes, she can also tell whether a candidate has low ownership based on how they describe why they left their previous job.

For example, if someone says “I left because my manager had it out for me” or “I wasn’t being managed well,” Schwager says she wants to hear about whether the candidate tried to take ownership and manage up.

Or, if they burned out at a previous job, Schwager wants to know if they learned from the situation to identify their burnout patterns, can communicate them to a boss or colleagues, and that they have acquired strategies to cope: “They recognized it, they learned from it, and they’ve applied those changes to their to experiences.”

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Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has spent the past couple decades warning the general public about ominous issues, from upcoming “climate disasters” to devastating cyberattacks.

Two potential catastrophes evoke the most concern from Gates. “A lot of unrest” in today’s world could spark “a major war,” he tells CNBC Make It. And even “if we avoid a big war … then, yes, there will be another pandemic, most likely in the next 25 years.”

Scientists typically view pandemics as likely, even inevitable, occurrences over time. They are indeed becoming more common, due to factors like climate change and population growth, research shows.

For Gates and other global health advocates, the question isn’t whether another pandemic will occur soon — it’s whether nations will be more prepared than they were for the outbreak of Covid-19. “The country that the world expected to lead and be the model fell short of those expectations,” Gates says, referring to the United States.

Gates wrote a book called “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic” in 2022, in which he called out various governments, including the U.S., for not being adequately prepared in 2020. In the book, he laid out several recommendations for countries worldwide, including stronger quarantining policies, investing in disease monitoring and boosting vaccine research and development.

While some progress has been made, with increased spending on pandemic preparedness in the U.S. and elsewhere, Gates says the global response hasn’t yet been enough. “Although some of the lessons from [the coronavirus] pandemic have been learned, [it’s been] way less than I would expect, sadly,” he says.

The political divisions many believe hampered the world’s response to Covid-19 are still standing in the way of preparing appropriately for the next outbreak, Gates adds: “Getting our thoughts together about what [we did] well, what we didn’t do well, is still not happening …. Perhaps, in the next five years, that’ll get better. But, so far, it’s quite surprising.”

Preventing widespread disease is the focus of an episode in the upcoming Netflix docuseries “What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates,” set to premiere September 18.

In an advance screening of the Netflix series provided to Make It, Gates sits down with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In that conversation, Fauci is adamant that the wealthiest nations, like the U.S., have a “moral responsibility” to share their abundant resources to lead the way on preventing the spread of disease around the world.

Fauci published a memoir this summer called “On Call,” in which he expressed his concerns over how the world is facing a “crisis of truth” over rampant misinformation, such as the kind that shook the public’s faith in public health initiatives.

The scientist struck a more optimistic tone in a July interview with People, in which he said he believes that public trust of scientific facts will eventually be restored.

“I still feel as somewhat of a cautious optimist that there are the better angels in everybody that will come out,” Fauci said.

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Student loan giant Navient has reached a $120 million settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over its practices with student loan borrowers, the company tells CNBC.

The CFPB sued Navient in 2017 for allegedly misleading borrowers and providing them with bad information, causing many to pay more than they needed to.

The consumer watchdog agency also accused Navient of steering student loan borrowers into expensive forbearances, causing many to pay steep interest charges.

Additionally, the CFPB alleged that Navient miscalculated borrowers’ payments and tarnished the credit reports of disabled borrowers, including severely injured veterans.

At the time, the lender was the largest student loan servicer in the U.S., managing the accounts of more than 12 million people.

Navient stopped servicing the government’s federal student loans in 2021. The lender has also agreed not to reenter servicing of federal student loans.

Navient still owns the private student loans for around 3.7 million people, although another servicer, Mohela, will soon service those accounts.

The company’s shares were up more than 5% in late-morning trading Thursday.

As part of the settlement, $100 million will be used to make payments to impacted customers, as determined by the CFPB, Navient said.

The remaining $20 million will go to the CFPB’s civil penalty fund.

“For years, Navient’s top executives profited handsomely by exploiting students and taxpayers,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement.

“By banning the notorious student loan giant from federal student loan servicing and ensuring the winddown of these operations, the CFPB will finally put an end to the years of abuse,” said Chopra.

Navient framed the agreement as a positive step for the company.

“This agreement puts these decade-old issues behind us,” a Navient spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “While we do not agree with the CFPB’s allegations, this resolution is consistent with our go-forward activities and is an important positive milestone in our transformation of the company.”

When Bill Gates dropped out of college to co-found Microsoft, he wasn’t thinking about becoming a billionaire or running a company that’s now valued at more than $3 trillion.

Gates, then 20 years old, had a much more “boring” definition of success, he tells CNBC Make It: “Back then, it was just: Is my code really good? Does it work? And can this company show the world that these microcomputers are big?”

At the time, in 1976, computer obsessives like Gates and co-founder Paul Allen were considered “hobbyists” — yet they fervently believed that a technological revolution was imminent. “It was the magic of software. And I was willing to focus my life, in my 20s, just on software, just on the one job,” says Gates.

Specifically, that job was creating high-quality software that could make the general public actually embrace the personal computer. “Our phrase was ‘a personal computer on every desk and in every home,’ which sounds boring today, but back then [it] was completely crazy,” says Gates, referencing the mission statement he and Allen often repeated to Microsoft’s early employees.

That intense focus on creating the best product possible didn’t mean Gates wasn’t aware that there was also money to be made — in fact, he insisted upon it from the beginning. In his famous “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in 1976, Gates wrote that users needed to pay fair prices to use software so that developers, like himself, were compensated well enough to ensure they could work on creating the new, high-quality software the industry needed to grow.

Gates’ singular mindset — “It was all Microsoft, all the time in my 20s … my view of success was very much Microsoft-centric,” he says — helped push the company to the forefront of the computer age, making him one of the world’s wealthiest people in the process. His current net worth is $128 billion, Forbes estimates.

Today, Gates enjoys “being polymathic and learning lots of things,” spending his free time reading about topics like biology, physics and climate science, he says. Those subjects are the focus of an upcoming Netflix docuseries called “What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates,” set to premiere on September 18.

Gates’ personal definition of success has “definitely evolved” from his younger days, he says.

In part, Gates regrets his single-minded focus, which kept him — and his employees — from enjoying a sense of work-life balance. Now, he advises everyone to “take a break when you need to,” he told students at Northern Arizona University’s commencement ceremony last year.

“I don’t work as hard [now],” Gates recently told Make It. “In my 20s, I didn’t believe in weekends and vacations. So, that was kind of out of control, how I pushed myself.”

Today, the 68-year-old’s idea of success revolves around a different question, he says: “Am I adding net value [to the world]?” He’s pledged to give away “virtually all” of his massive fortune — within the next 20 years, he’s said — through initiatives like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and his clean-energy investment group, Breakthrough Energy.

“Now, I can define my success in terms of empowering other people [by] sharing what I did wrong, what I did right and providing my resources to things like malaria or climate change,” says Gates.

He’s looking forward to continuing that work over the next few decades, if his health allows, he adds: “I’m just super lucky to be in a different phase [of my life], but still able to feel like [I’m] making a difference.”

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