Finance
One college major is more popular than ever—but comes with financial catch
One college major is soaring in popularity—but graduates shouldn’t expect to be making good money from that alone.
A degree in psychology has proven an increasingly popular choice for college students year after year, with a noted spike in degrees awarded following 2020.
In 2023, 140,711 bachelor’s degrees in psychology were awarded to graduates across the United States, compared to 86,989 two decades earlier in 2004, according to the American Psychologial Association (APA).
The trend has been attributed to several possible factors, from younger generations becoming more open about mental health discussions, to online psychology influencers gaining popularity, and even certain films and TV shows.
But while the number of psychology graduates is increasing, the monetary reward may not be what they hope.
According to a 2025 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the median wage of a psychology graduate in their early career is $45,000—moving to $70,000 by mid-career.
Dr. Ryan Sultan MD, double board-certified and the founder and director of Integrative Psych, believes the rise in psychology degrees is generational.
“Younger people tend to be more open to discussing mental health topics, including anxiety, depression, and trauma,” he told Newsweek. “They’re more comfortable having conversations about psychological wellbeing compared to previous generations. They have more exposure to psychology and related concepts, and therefore more people are seeking out psychology degrees.”
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Career strategist Patrice Williams Lindo, CEO of Career Nomad, suggested this choice of major is rising “because people are desperate to understand themselves and the world around them, especially in the wake of collective trauma from the pandemic, social unrest, and economic uncertainty.
“Gen Z in particular is drawn to psychology not only through TikTok therapy culture but because they see mental health work as purpose-driven—even if it doesn’t pay six figures out the gate.”
Lindo pointed to a particular uptick of interest in psychology majors post-pandemic, as discourse around mental health became more mainstream on social platfoms, which may have made psychology degrees feel culturally relevant and important, despite it not having a clear career path post-graduation.
When it comes to graduate roles being relatively poorly paid, Sultan believes this is a positive thing “for the future of psychology.”
“I find that these younger psychology students are conscious of the fact that it’s not a money-driven profession, and therefore choose this field because they are genuinely interested in understanding the mind and human behavior,” he suggested.
However, Sultan works closely with psychology students at his practice, and notes some may not know exactly what the course and career entail, as they “often tell me that they weren’t expecting the field to have such a large research component.”
Career strategist Linda said people may not realize that a bachelor’s degree in psychology alone rarely leads to a high-paying role, and being a clinician requires a lot of further work.
“You need a clear plan for either further training or using your psych background in allied fields—like UX research, HR, or policy—if you want sustainable income.”
This correlates with the experience of Dr. Azadeh Weber, who now runs a private practice in California where she says she makes $200,000 a year working part-time. But after graduating with a bachelor’s in psychology, she couldn’t find a job in her field and ended up with a career in tech sales, unrelated to her degree.
At the age of 30, she returned to education, attending graduate school, and became a doctor of clinical psychology at the age of 36.
“I believe the reason why getting an undergraduate degree in psychology is popular is because many people are intrinsically motivated to understand themselves and others,” she said.
“One of the most beautiful parts of my job is also learning from my clients. Everyone has something to teach others,” she said.
She noted that, had she stayed in her tech sales career, at this stage she “may be making the same income as I do now” but it would likely mean having to work “full-time at a corporation.”
“This would mean less time with my family. Overall, I am happy with my decision and love my job.”
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Banking has entered a new phase of transformation that has the potential to remake large swaths of the industry. For much of the past decade, innovation was often framed around modernization efforts such as upgrading legacy systems, improving digital channels, or experimenting with emerging technologies through pilots and limited deployments. Now, the institutions pulling ahead competitively are distinguished by their willingness to explore innovation early and their ability to operationalize it at scale and translate it into measurable business outcomes.
Across the industry, innovation is beginning to reshape the economics and competitive structure of financial services in more tangible ways. Revenue models are evolving. Operational costs are being reconfigured through the strategic integration of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and blockchain. That, in turn, is fundamentally changing how capital is allocated. Risk management is becoming more data driven, predictive and automated. Customer expectations around speed, personalization and accessibility continue to rise as the instant-everything culture takes hold.
What makes the current cycle particularly significant is that several major technology shifts are unfolding simultaneously and beginning to intersect. AI, real-time payments, digital assets, tokenization, cloud-native infrastructure, embedded finance, and programmable financial systems are increasingly reinforcing one another and revamping how financial institutions operate, deliver services and compete.
These factors compelled American Banker to launch The Most Innovative People in Finance, a new annual ranking that recognizes the top 50 individuals who are driving these massive waves of digital transformation—producing measurable results, shoring up their competitive positions, opening new markets, and, in some cases, redefining the industry.
Leading this year’s list is #1-ranked Vantage Bank CEO Jeff Sinnott for the launch of the U.S.’s first bank-issued stablecoin; followed in the top five spots by Custodia Bank CEO Caitlin Long (#2) for the debut of a tokenized deposit network for community banks; Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti (#3) for developing and deploying the firm’s widespread internal use cases for agentic AI; TD Bank SVP and Chief AI Scientist Maksims Volkovs (#4) for the development of its predictive foundation AI model; and Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley (#5) for becoming the issuer of Tether’s U.S.-regulated stablecoin USA₮.
The methodology used to select the 50 individuals is based on quantitative and qualitative factors encompassing leadership, investment in technology innovation, and number, size and impact of digital transformation initiatives over a single year (2025) and three-year time horizon, including internal cost efficiency gains and/or new revenue generation, and, where applicable, impact on the industry. American Banker also considered the role that the individual played in driving digital transformation initiatives in 2025, percentage of technology budget allocated to new innovation projects, products and initiatives, specific funding amount allocated to digital transformation initiatives annually, acquisitions and partnerships initiated to advance the bank’s innovation, impact on creating an internal culture of innovation, and number of patents held in their name.
Why does recognition of outstanding leadership in innovation matter now more than ever?
Consider that AI sits at the center of much of the transformative change—with advanced forms of AI increasingly coordinating workflows, monitoring transactions in real time, supporting liquidity management, identifying anomalous behavior, and assisting with operational decision-making across multiple functions simultaneously.
At the same time, the movement and representation of value itself is changing, with stablecoins, tokenized deposits, blockchain-based settlement systems, and digital-asset infrastructure evolving from experimentation into broader commercial use cases.
As such, real-time payment networks, richer transaction data standards, embedded financial services, and intelligent payment routing are transforming payments into a central layer of customer engagement and commercial activity.
Underpinning many of these developments is a broader modernization of banking infrastructure. Cloud-native architecture, API-driven platforms, and modular technology environments are driving adaptability, data accessibility, ecosystem connectivity, and the ability to integrate intelligence directly into operational workflows.
This period of structural change is altering the competitive dynamics of the industry, requiring leadership that understands when to invest, where to modernize, which risks are worth taking and how to aggressively reposition their institutions for the future.
Photographer: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg
© 2025 Bloomberg Finance LP
Crypto has always traded on a different clock. Bitcoin does not close for weekends, liquidity does not pause for holidays, and leverage does not wait for clearing desks to reopen on Monday morning. For years, that difference helped separate crypto-native venues from regulated financial infrastructure.
That separation is narrowing. CME Group said its regulated cryptocurrency futures and options will be available for 24-hour, seven-day trading beginning May 29, pending regulatory review, with trading continuing on CME Globex except for a weekly maintenance window. The move is more than an operational extension. It is a sign that traditional finance is being pulled toward the market structure crypto normalized first.
The harder question is not whether institutions can trade crypto around the clock. They already can, through offshore venues, prime brokers, market makers, and liquidity providers. The harder question is whether regulated finance’s clearing, custody, surveillance, privacy, and risk systems can operate in markets where leverage, information, and volatility never really switch off.
Crypto’s 24/7 derivatives era is not simply making digital assets look more institutional. It is forcing traditional finance to become more continuous.
Derivatives are becoming crypto’s institutional layer
The center of gravity in crypto markets has been moving away from simple spot trading for years. Spot markets still matter, especially for retail flows, exchange liquidity, and ETF-related demand. But derivatives are where much of the institutional market now expresses risk, hedges exposure, prices volatility, and manages leverage.
That shift is visible in the data. CCData’s January 2026 Exchange Review reported combined centralized exchange volumes of $5.26 trillion, while spot trading accounted for $1.27 trillion. The implication is clear: derivatives represented the majority of centralized exchange activity that month.
This matters because derivatives do not just reflect price discovery. In crypto, they increasingly shape it. Futures, perpetual swaps, and options influence liquidity, funding rates, volatility expectations, and institutional positioning. When derivatives become the dominant venue for market expression, trading hours become less a convenience issue and more a structural one.
That is why CME’s move is significant. Regulated access is no longer just about listing a bitcoin or ether contract. It is about matching the operating rhythm of the asset itself.
CME also said client demand for digital asset risk management helped drive a record $3 trillion in notional cryptocurrency futures and options volume in 2025. That is not a fringe market asking for extended access. It is a regulated derivatives marketplace responding to institutional demand for more continuous risk management.
Continuous trading still runs into legacy settlement
The tension is that continuous execution does not automatically mean continuous settlement. CME’s model extends trading access, but it still preserves familiar institutional mechanics. Weekend and holiday trades are assigned the next business day’s trade date, and clearing, settlement and regulatory reporting continue to flow through the next business day framework.
That is the bridge traditional finance is trying to build: crypto-speed execution on top of regulated market infrastructure. It is a practical compromise, but also a revealing one. Crypto markets solved for continuous trading first and institutional controls second. Traditional finance is trying to do the reverse.
There are good reasons for that. Regulated derivatives markets cannot simply discard reporting obligations, margin discipline, risk controls, and clearing protocols. Their value proposition is precisely that institutions can trade within a transparent, supervised framework.
But always-on markets compress the time available to react. A move that happens on a Sunday morning can affect collateral needs, counterparty exposures, hedge ratios, and liquidity conditions before traditional workflows fully resume. In that environment, operational readiness becomes part of market structure.
The next competitive edge may not be who lists the product first. It may be who can monitor risk, margin exposure, custody flows, and compliance exceptions in real time without weakening the controls institutions rely on.
Transparency becomes a risk surface
Crypto’s always-on design also introduces a second challenge: information moves continuously too. Public blockchains make settlement visible, auditable, and difficult to falsify. That can reduce certain intermediary risks. But the same transparency can expose flows that businesses would normally treat as confidential.
“It does both simultaneously,” said Natalie Newson, Senior Blockchain Investigator at CertiK, when asked whether public blockchain transparency reduces systemic risk or creates new attack surfaces. “Settlement finality is also publicly auditable,” she said, but “front-running and MEV are persistent issues in blockchain.”
That duality is central to the institutional adoption question. Public auditability is useful when markets need trust in settlement. It is less straightforward when market participants reveal treasury movements, collateral positioning, payroll flows, or supplier payments in real time.
Newson framed the business risk directly. “If your treasury wallet is known, and on-chain, it eventually becomes known, counterparties, suppliers, and competitors can watch your liquidity position in real time,” she said.
For trading firms, that visibility can affect execution. For corporations, it can expose working capital strategy. For institutions, it can turn settlement infrastructure into a source of market intelligence for competitors. In a 24/7 derivatives environment, information leakage does not wait for office hours either.
This is where the conversation moves beyond cybersecurity. The issue is not just hacks, exploits, or smart contract vulnerabilities. It is whether an always-on financial system can protect commercially sensitive behavior while preserving the auditability that makes blockchain infrastructure useful in the first place.
Privacy is becoming part of market infrastructure
The early crypto argument treated transparency as a feature. That was true for open monetary networks and early DeFi systems, where public verification helped establish trust. But what works for a speculative or experimental market does not automatically work for enterprise finance.
“Transparency becomes a structural constraint the moment a business tries to use blockchain for real operations,” said Varun Kabra, Chief Growth Officer of Concordium. “Payroll, supplier contracts, treasury flows, pricing structures, these are not marketing data points.”
That is the institutional bottleneck hiding inside the 24/7 trading conversation. It is not enough for markets to stay open. The systems around those markets need ways to prove identity, authorization, eligibility, and compliance without exposing more information than necessary.
Kabra’s broader point is that the next phase of adoption depends on combining privacy with accountability. “The next phase of adoption won’t come from arguing with regulators,” he said. “It will come from building systems where privacy and accountability coexist by design.”
That logic is already moving beyond financial markets. Concordium’s partnership with the Danish Ice Hockey Union includes a Verified Fan Programme using zero-knowledge proofs and an Agentic Commerce initiative around verified AI agents, showing how users or automated agents could prove access rights or authorization without disclosing unnecessary personal data.
The sports example is not the point. The infrastructure pattern is. As markets become more automated and more continuous, identity and selective disclosure become part of the same control stack as margining, custody, and surveillance.
Traditional finance is learning to operate on crypto’s clock
The obvious reading of CME’s 24/7 move is that crypto is becoming more institutional. That is true, but incomplete. The more interesting reading is that traditional finance is beginning to adopt pieces of crypto-native market structure because client demand, volatility, and liquidity have already moved in that direction.
This does not mean regulated finance will become decentralized. It will not. Institutions still need clearinghouses, custodians, reporting systems, market surveillance, and legal accountability. What changes is the cadence. Risk systems that were designed around market closes and business-day workflows will need to function in a market where exposure changes continuously.
That transition will not happen all at once. Execution hours can expand faster than settlement systems. Trading access can move faster than compliance architecture. Liquidity can move faster than privacy standards. The result is a hybrid market structure: crypto assets trading on a crypto clock, through increasingly regulated venues, with traditional finance rebuilding its control layer around a more continuous environment.
For investors, this means crypto derivatives are becoming more than a trading product. They are becoming the test case for how legacy market infrastructure adapts to always-on finance.
The next phase of institutional crypto adoption will not be defined only by which assets get listed or which venues gain market share. It will be defined by whether the financial system can manage risk, identity, privacy, and settlement at the speed crypto markets already demand.
RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) — Families are navigating the already stressful college planning process, and a new set of financial grades is prompting many to look more closely at the stability of the schools they are considering.
Forbes’ annual financial report card for private, nonprofit colleges and universities is putting a spotlight on how well schools can manage their finances. The rankings are based on each institution’s ability to cover immediate expenses with cash on hand — a measure that is increasingly resonating with parents.
In the Triangle, the grades vary widely. Duke University received an A+, while Meredith College earned a B-. Shaw University was rated C-, and Saint Augustine’s University received a D.
For families, those grades are becoming an important part of the decision-making process, alongside academic and campus life.
“This college experience is much more than the books and the tuition,” Wake Forest parent Meranda Van Ningen said.
Van Ningen said a school’s financial condition is now a key factor as she — and many other parents — evaluate long-term value and security.
“We had to really lean in and ask the questions, make sure that we were getting the answers we appreciated,” she said. “They want us. They want our money to come in and to pay for that next year.”
She said the financial grades offer insight into how well schools can navigate economic challenges.
“Show that they can handle this tough, tough economy, to be honest, and that they know how to roll with it because campuses have good years and bad years as well,” Van Ningen said.
Financial planners say that shift in focus is well-founded, especially as some colleges across the country face financial strain or closure.
“A lot of smaller colleges are closing throughout the country,” said Gray Pendleton, president of Pendleton Financial. “I think it’s important to look at the financial health of the school.”
Experts say the added scrutiny reflects the high stakes of higher education, often one of the largest investments a family will make. Along with reviewing financial grades, they encourage families to thoroughly research institutions before committing.
They also stress the importance of early financial preparation to manage rising costs.
“Even like, $10 to $100 a month,” Pendleton said. “The NC 529 savings plan is great. And that’s an aggressive, age based plan. That’s a good opportunity.”
As financial grades draw more attention, families are increasingly weighing not just where students will thrive academically, but also which schools are best positioned to remain financially secure over the long term.
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