Brian Snyder / Reuters

A view shows the silhouette of a student with a graduation cap as students take their seats for the diploma ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in this May 24, 2012, file picture.

Want a solid, middle-class salary straight out of college? Skip the last two years.

A site that analyzes state-level data of how much people earn a year after graduating college found some counterintuitive results: Certain students who earn associate’s degrees can get higher salaries than graduates of four-year programs — sometimes thousands of dollars more. 

“These numbers and the consistency of these numbers are surprising to me,” said Mark Schneider, president of CollegeMeasures.org and a vice president at the American Institutes for Research. CollegeMeasures aggregates anonymized education and earnings data to figure out who earns what after graduation. 

Some of its results run counter to commonly-held assumptions. Community college degrees, long considered also-ran prizes in the race for academic achievement, “are worth a lot more than I expected and that I think other people expected,” Schneider said.

But there is a catch: You have to earn your degree in a technical or occupational program to earn anywhere near $40,000. That’s the approximate average earned by students who went to school and worked in the state of Virginia and graduated with two-year degrees in these fields between 2006 and 2010. Graduates of two-year nursing programs earned am average of $45,342.

Once they entered the work force, holders of what CollegeMeasures characterizes as “occupational/technical” associate’s degrees made about $6,000 a year more than people who earned associate’s degrees in non-occupational programs. Given the high demand for nurses, computer specialists, mechanical technicians and the like, that’s not unexpected. In a study published earlier this year by the Census Bureau, college graduates with science and engineering degrees were about 10 percentage points more likely to be employed full-time than the average of all graduates.

The surprising finding is a comparison of those earnings to what bachelor’s degree graduates made, on average: $36,067.

People with liberal arts and humanities majors didn’t even fare that well: on average, grads with political science majors earned $31,184, history majors earned $30,230 and English majors only earned $29,222 a year.

"In general, majors that are linked to occupations have better employment prospects than majors focused on general skills," a report published earlier this year by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, said. 

Schneider said this pattern of workers with two-year technical degrees outearning many four-year grads has been consistent across the states it has studied so far. (Data on Arkansas, Virginia and Tennessee has been published; the group plans to release statistics for Colorado graduates soon.)

“In the U.S., we’ve tended to think that the bachelor’s degree is the only thing that matters, and this data tells us that technical degrees from community colleges are hidden gems,” he said.

A generation ago, things were different. Before the recession of 1980-1981, a bachelor’s degree of any kind was a ticket to a career that offered middle-class earnings, said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce.

This isn’t the case anymore, he said. “It’s a system in which you can’t just have an ambition to go to college and get a degree. You have to pay attention to the courses and the content of your degree.”

The big caveat with the impressive amounts some two-year grads can earn is that they don’t reflect lifetime earnings. In general, people with more advanced degrees still earn more over the course of their careers, Carnevale said, but there’s a growing divergence between humanities and technical-field majors when it comes to future earnings performance. 

“The degree level matters, but a lot less than it used to,” he said “What matters is what you take. Thinking about it as a hierarchy of degrees isn’t the way to think about it anymore.”

U.S. Census Bureau

Your chioce of college major can have major financial implications.

Think carefully about your college major: A bad decision could cost you $1 million.

A new Census Bureau report finds that engineering majors can make over $1 million more in the course of a lifetime than those who major in fields like psychology and education.

The median, or midpoint, of earnings for engineering majors who work full-time, year-round, was $91,611 per year, the report found. Education majors had the lowest median earnings among the degree categories included in the survey, at $50,902 per year.

Business majors fell somewhere in the middle, with median full-time earnings of $66,605.

Men had higher earnings than women in every degree category. Those who worked in the private sector also tended to make more than those who work in government. Many education majors work for the government as public school teachers.

The report is based on 2011 American Community Survey, an annual sample of more than 3 million American households, and looked at people ages 25 and over with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

It comes as many Americans are heading to college – or back to college – in the hopes of improving their job prospects amid a tight job market.

In general, experts say that’s a smart move: A college degree usually puts you on the path to higher earnings and more job security over the course of a lifetime.

Still, in recent years it’s also left many Americans burdened with debt. That’s why experts say it’s more important than ever to make sure you choose a field of study that is likely to lead to a good job.

Of course, not everyone has a passion for, or ability to do, work in the more lucrative fields of science and engineering.

For those with a passion for education, there may be a silver lining. A separate report released this year by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that education majors enjoyed among the strongest job prospects because the unemployment rate is low in the teaching profession.

M. Spencer Green / AP

Anyone who’s ever worked for minimum wage knows that it’s tough make ends meet on $7.25 an hour. A new economic index, released Friday, attempts to show just how tough.

The Basic Economic Security Tables finds that a single worker would have to make around $30,012 a year, or nearly double the annual salary you’d earn working full-time for minimum wage, to meet their basic expenses.

A single parent raising two children would require an annual wage of $57,756, according to the report, while a household with two income earners and two kids needs $67,920.

The index was developed by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit that focuses on ways for families and women to achieve economic independence. Its measure of basic expenses includes day-to-day costs such as childcare, housing, health care and transportation, as well as long-term needs such as savings and retirement.

“We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one’s lifelong economic security,” Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities for Women, told The New York Times in a story published Friday.  “And we’ve all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for,” she told the Times, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises “can definitely begin to draw us into poverty.”

According to the Census Bureau, the median household income in 2009 was $49,777.

The Census Bureau also reported that the poverty rate hit 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest level since 1994.

Researchers on both sides of the ideological fence have long argued that the poverty rate is a poor measure of how Americans earning low wages are really faring. Liberal-leaning analysts often say the data understate the extent to which Americans are suffering to make ends meet, while some conservatives worry the data overstate the issue.