If your goal is to make money right after college, majoring in engineering is one of the safest bets.

That’s because many of the highest-paying degrees are in that field, new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows. The rankings line up with previous years’ data, which consistently place engineering fields at the top for median salaries within five years of graduation.

Top-paying majors include computer engineering, chemical engineering and computer science, with graduates earning a median early-career salary of $80,000. All engineering majors in the study have median early-career pay above $70,000.

Here’s a look at the highest-paying majors for workers ages 22 to 27.

Engineering grads are in high demand for their mix of mathematical skills and technical expertise, qualities that are valuable across a wide range of industries. With the growth of tech-driven fields like artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, it’s not surprising that computer engineering majors are among the highest-paid graduates.

Many of the top-paying majors continue to deliver strong returns over time. Among full-time workers ages 35 to 45, engineering majors typically earn six-figure salaries. Here’s a look at the rankings for mid-career graduates.

In contrast, the lowest-paying majors tend to be in liberal arts or education. Among graduates ages 22 to 27, foreign language majors report the lowest median salary at $40,000. For workers between ages 35 and 45, early childhood education majors earn the least with a median salary of $49,000.

The New York Fed’s annual study is based on 2023 U.S. Census data, the most recent available. It excludes currently enrolled students. Median wage data reflects full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree only.

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Angela Beatty, chief leadership and human resources officer at Accenture, has been working in HR for more than two decades. In that time, she’s figured out how to gauge her resume red and green flags and what those could mean about candidates.

Among her red flags is multiple work stints of less than a year.

That makes her question if a candidate is “able to gain some traction and collaborate and work with others in a way that would enable them to stay at a place long enough to make an impact,” she says. She suggests jobseekers give some context in their resumes to make sure hiring managers know why those stints lasted the length they did.

There are attributes she loves to see in a resume, though. Here’s her No. 1 green flag, and how she suggests jobseekers highlight it.

“The No. 1 thing that I am looking for and we’re looking for is learning, agility, curiosity,” says Beatty.

That has a lot to do with the fast-changing nature of technology and specifically AI. “It’s hard to think of any sort of job or place where [people are] not going to use” generative AI, she says, and a person who’s keen and able to learn will more likely be able to adapt and adopt that new tech.

“Showing how you are growing your skills” on your resume will underscore this quality, says Beatty.

There are many ways to prove you have this attribute. Maybe you’ve done some development programs at work, for example. But it “doesn’t have to be necessarily in the job,” says Beatty.

It could be a certificate in a skill you want to master. “Maybe people were volunteering,” she says, “taking a course or teaching a course” that has nothing to do with their profession. “I would love to also see in a resume that somebody has taken a cooking course or does a blog” around it. The point is just to show that you’re hungry for knowledge and ways to improve.

You can include these kinds of experiences — whether they be at work or in your personal life — in an “interests” or “skills and certifications” section at the bottom of your resume, depending on where they fit in.

Do you want a new career that’s higher-paying, more flexible or fulfilling? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Change Careers and Be Happier at Work. Expert instructors will teach you strategies to network successfully, revamp your resume and confidently transition into your dream career. Sign up today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off $67 (+taxes and fees) through May 13, 2025.

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FarmboxRx might be Ashley Tyrner-Dolce’s brainchild, but bringing the company to life wasn’t a one-woman show.

Tyrner-Dolce founded her New York-based food subscription service in 2014 after struggling to find and afford fresh fruits and vegetables as a young, single mom. Her company partners with health insurance agencies to send low-income Americans healthy groceries at a low-to-no out-of-pocket cost, and brought in roughly $55 million in annual revenue as recently as 2023, according to a company spokesperson.

FarmboxRx has been consistently profitable since 2022, the spokesperson adds.

She credits her success at least partially to a simple idea: finding people you can trust, and relying on them to help you in difficult moments, across any facet of your life.

When Tyrner-Dolce moved to New York from Arizona in 2011 with her then-newborn daughter, she dealt with the city’s high cost of living by crashing with friends, she says. Now, as a CEO, she says surrounding herself with “the best talent” is more important than prioritizing her own ego.

“That’s a really difficult thing for entrepreneurs to do. You have this idea and so you feel like you should implement it this way, and it’s hard giving the reins over to other people,” says Tyrner-Dolce. “But you can’t do everything … Your true job as a CEO is to actually just surround yourself with people who are way smarter than you in other pieces of the business.”

Her advice extends beyond entrepreneurs and CEOs: Countless leadership experts and business books preach the value of delegation. Recognizing when to let the smart, capable people around you help shoulder your workload can help you mitigate burnout, build trust with your colleagues and improve your team’s overall efficiency.

“One of the key lessons, I think, was getting out of my own way,” Apothékary founder and CEO, Shizu Okusa, told CNBC Make It in December. “In terms of allowing and hiring people that were much better than I was in certain areas of business. Now, I just move aside. I have my strengths and give my weaknesses away.”

Tyrner-Dolce counts her husband, colleagues, entrepreneur friends, other family members and even the nanny who cared for her daughter during FarmboxRx’s early days as people who’ve helped her manage all of her responsibilities.

She cites the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in March 2023 as an example: FarmboxRx had eight figures’ worth of money inaccessible for more than 18 hours, Tyrner-Dolce says. She couldn’t get in contact with her banker, and panicked at the thought of losing so much money, she adds.

Her COO supported her through the ordeal, she says — initiating a wire transfer to move cash to another account and keeping her level-headed during what she describes as the “worst day of my life.”

″[The village] that I’ve surrounded myself with has allowed me to focus on growing the business [as a working mom,” Tyrner-Dolce says. “I’ve had really great advisors along my journey that I’ve been able to bounce off of. [That’s] really, really important for any business that’s growing.”

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With tariffs creating economic uncertainty, many Americans are rethinking their emergency savings — and whether to keep some physical cash at home.

Not every financial planner thinks physical cash is essential, but some say it’s wise to keep a small amount on hand in case of power outages, natural disasters or payment disruptions.

“I would be comfortable with $500 to $1,000 in cash for unforeseen issues” like a hurricane, says Matthew Saneholtz, a certified financial planner at Tobias Financial Advisors in Florida.

Keeping $300 to $500 at home for emergencies or unexpected cash-only expenses is reasonable, says Crystal McKeon, CFP at TSA Wealth Management.

Keeping cash at home is “a personal choice,” says Melissa Caro, CFP and founder of My Retirement Network. While she says it can be “useful” in some situations, she cautions against relying too heavily on it.

“I wouldn’t go overboard with physical cash, since it’s not FDIC-insured and doesn’t earn interest,” Caro says. FDIC insurance covers up to $250,000 per person, per bank, across all accounts, if the FDIC-insured bank fails.

There are other downsides, too. “It can be subject to loss, theft, destruction or even impulse,” says Nicole Sullivan, CFP and co-founder of Prism Planning Partners. “If you have a significant amount of physical bills on hand, you may be more tempted to spend on ‘extras’ that you otherwise would avoid.”

If you do keep cash at home, be discreet about it, says McKeon: “Even if you think these items are safely stored in a safe, spreading this information is likely to make you a target for thieves.”

Beyond a small stash of cash at home, now is a good time to revisit your emergency fund. Financial planners typically recommend saving three to six months’ worth of essential expenses in a checking or high-yield savings account — someplace accessible, but separate from your day-to-day spending.

But with greater economic uncertainty, you might want to extend those savings to as much as a year’s worth of expenses. “If you are in an industry with layoffs likely ahead … shoot for more like nine to 12 months,” Saneholtz says.

Still, many Americans fall short when it comes to emergency savings. About 42% have no emergency savings, and 40% couldn’t cover a $1,000 expense, according to a 2025 survey from U.S. News & World Report.

If you’re starting from zero, remember that having any sort of financial cushion is better than none. “If you start at $50, it’s more than you had last month,” McKeon says. From there, try to increase your savings as your budget allows, especially by trimming non-essential spending, she says.

For an initial goal, savings of $1,000 is useful “to have on hand to fix your car, to cover small repairs on the house and minor medical situations,” says McKeon.

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When I was pregnant with my first child, my mind was still in work mode. Since starting my company Bridesmaid for Hire in 2014, I’d often worked 70-hour weeks, traveled all over the country for business opportunities, and attached my identity to my hustle. I didn’t want any of that to change just because I was becoming a mom. 

I planned to take six weeks of maternity leave, lining up childcare and business gigs — working weddings and speaking at conferences — right afterward. 

But after my daughter was born in early 2023, I no longer craved being pulled in a dozen different directions. I still wanted to run my company, but I also wanted to spend quality time with my baby.

At first, I put in 40 to 50 hours a week when my daughter was sleeping during the day and when my husband came home from work. But as she grew out of the baby phase, parenting became more hands-on and I could only manage about half of it. 

I decided that I needed to shift how I was working so that I could still earn money while giving my daughter the attention she deserved. Today, I make about $6,300 a month in passive income. Here’s how I made it happen. 

As an entrepreneur, I constantly want to create new products and services. But with less time, I looked instead at how I could monetize the resources and foundations I already established.

For example, I put Google ads on my website, which had about 463,000 users in the last year. Traffic swings mean ad income varies. When I have ads turned on, I earn on average $391 per month, with zero hours of work involved. 

DON’T MISS: How to start a side hustle to earn extra money

This monetization method can diminish the user experience on your website and distract from your own messaging and products. So whenever I have a big product launch coming up, I turn off this revenue stream to focus on quality and conversions. 

I send out weekly newsletters to over 100,000 subscribers and post several times a week on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook to over 90,000 social media followers. A lot of my content is centered around wedding and other suggestions and advice, so I use affiliate links.

Two programs I joined, Amazon Associates and RewardStyle, allow me to create curated storefronts and share links to those lists in my social media profile bios and newsletters. This takes about two hours a week.

If a person buys a product I’ve recommended (or other products on the same website) after clicking through my affiliate link, I receive a commission. The amount varies based on the platform, product, and other factors. The payout averages $129 a month.

Clients often hire me to write their maid of honor speeches. It’s a time-consuming process that takes five or six hours per speech. It wasn’t scalable and I frequently had to turn clients away because I didn’t have the bandwidth. Sometimes I said yes anyway. Just hours after giving birth, I sat in the hospital bed trying to finish drafting one.

I decided to team up with a developer who helped me build an AI maid of honor speech writing tool. He took over 200 speeches I’d composed and programmed the tool to replicate the writing style, format, and structure I used.

This allowed me to offer my service at a lower price point ($35 instead of $397) and scale it to work with an unlimited number of customers. In the past year, we’ve expanded to different types of wedding speeches and vows, and even created a similar tool for eulogies. 

These tools bring in an average of $5,380 a month. I usually spend around five hours a week working on marketing, writing SEO-related blog posts, and designing or filming social media content related to these tools. 

One of my first sources of passive income was an online course I launched in 2017. The idea came from a popular request I got from people wanting to start a wedding side hustle like mine. It took me a few weeks to write, film videos, and create the assignments.

I’ve since launched over a dozen courses, including one on public speaking and another on personal branding. They’re available on my website and I often promote them via social media and newsletters. I spend two to three hours a month updating my courses and creating content to market them. 

I also have three books and a newlywed card game. And early last year, I started monetizing my weekly newsletter. I offer a paid subscriber tier that comes with added benefits, like access to newsletter archives, surprise gifts in the mail, and free copies of my books. This takes only an additional hour of time a month to manage.

All together, these digital and physical products generate about $380 a month. 

These passive income streams allow my business to stay afloat and give me time to focus on the projects I’m most excited about, like new products and a podcast. 

Most of all, I don’t regret working less so I can spend more time with my toddler.

Jen Glantz is the founder of Bridesmaid for Hire, the author of ”Finally the Bride: Finding Love after Walking down Everyone Else’s Aisle,” and the creator of The Pick-Me-Up newsletter. Follow her adventures on Instagram @jenglantz.

Want to earn some extra money on the side? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Start a Side Hustle to learn tips to get started and strategies for success from top side hustle experts. Sign up today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off $97 (+taxes and fees) through April 1, 2025.