Monthly Archives: July 2019

Business and Hard Sciences Graduates are Bullish about their Futures; Humanities & Social Sciences Majors Less Confident

Cengage Student Opportunity Index Measures Outlook by College Major

BOSTON—July 18, 2019 — This month, incoming college freshman will tackle their first on-campus experience: orientation. As students register for classes and contemplate majors, data from the Cengage Student Opportunity Index sheds light on how recent and upcoming graduates are faring. According to the Index, graduates in business and hard sciences (STEM, Healthcare and Biosciences) are bullish about their job opportunities and economic outlook, while humanities & social sciences majors are less optimistic about their futures.

“It’s important that students understand how the decisions they make now may impact their lives long after graduation, such as how much debt to take on and job prospects.  While the Index shows Humanities majors feel more uncertainty about their futures than other majors, the liberal arts cultivates skills like critical thinking and effective communication. These soft skills or uniquely human skills are key to workplace success, and graduates who demonstrate strength in this area will have an advantage,” said Michael E. Hansen, CEO of Cengage.

The Cengage Student Opportunity Index measured the opportunity environment for graduates across 17 indicators, using existing public data and a survey of 2,500 recent and upcoming graduates.

Here are the key findings across college majors:

Employment Outlook: Upcoming graduates are confident they will land a job fairly quickly after graduating, though some majors are more positive than others.

• Business students are the most confident they will land a job in their field (97 percent); while Humanities & Social Sciences students are the least confident (86 percent), however the majority of students in both fields are confident in their job prospects.

• Healthcare graduates are the most likely to be working in their field of study (69 percent); while less than half of Humanities & Social Sciences graduates are working in their field (46 percent).

• Healthcare and STEM majors (both 92 percent) are most likely to say jobs in their field will increase in the next two years.

Job Considerations: Non-financial job priorities vary by major but doing work that makes a difference seems to come at the expense of growth opportunities for working recent and upcoming graduates.

• Business majors are more likely to have a job that offers work-life balance and growth opportunities than one that makes a difference in peoples’ lives.

• Healthcare and Humanities & Social Sciences majors are more likely to work in a job they feel is making a difference, but are least likely to have a job with growth opportunities.

• Three-quarters of STEM majors (75 percent) are confident they will meet their salary expectations compared to half of Humanities & Social Sciences majors (51 percent) .

Debt: While student loan debt is on the rise, some majors are less impacted than others.

• Healthcare majors are most likely to have no debt (63 percent).

• Biosciences majors are more likely to owe higher amounts of debt (more than $30,000).

• Less than half of Humanities majors (44 percent) said they would graduate with debt, and those with debt are the most realistic about how long they expect it will take to pay it off– 8 years, though that is still lower than federal estimates.

Future Outlook: Most graduates are optimistic about their future, but some majors are uncertain about the future of the country.

• Humanities & Social Sciences majors have the most negative outlook – only half (51 percent) think they will be better off than their parents;

• Only 32 percent of Humanities & Social Science majors think the U.S. economic outlook is better than when they began school, compared to about 65 percent of STEM majors who think it is better.

• Half of STEM majors (50 percent) think the country is headed in the right direction; while only 24 percent of Humanities & Social Sciences majors agree.

For more information about the Cengage Student Opportunity Index, visit https://www.cengage.com/todays-learner/career-readiness/ or download the ebook here.

About Cengage
Cengage is the education and technology company built for learners. As the largest US-based provider of teaching and learning materials for higher education, we offer valuable options at affordable price points. Our industry-leading initiatives include Cengage Unlimited, the first-of-its-kind all-access digital subscription service.  We embrace innovation to create learning experiences that build confidence and momentum toward the future students want. Headquartered in Boston, Cengage also serves K-12, library and workforce training markets around the world. Visit us at www.cengage.com or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

About the Index Methodology
The Cengage Student Opportunity Index is calculated based on 17 indicators across four categories: Economic, Employment, Social and Personal Well-Being, with data obtained from both primary and secondary sources.

Primary data was obtained from an online survey conducted by Wakefield Research among 2,500 recent or near college graduates, defined as those who graduated in the past 12 months or who will graduate in the next 12 months. The survey was fielded between January 18 and February 1, 2019. Quotas were set to include 500 students in each of the following majors: business, biological and biomedical sciences, health professions and related programs, humanities and social sciences, and STEM subjects excluding biological and biomedical sciences. The margin of error for this study among the total sample is +/- 2.0 percentage points, calculated at the 95 percent confidence level.

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Media Contact

Kristina Massari
Cengage
203-965-8694
Kristina.massari@cengage.com

Zdaly Provides Free Research Tool of 3.3 Billion Trends for Academia

July 17, 2019 – Houston, Texas – Zdaly, a venture backed data intelligence leader, announced it has released the world’s largest quantitative research data platform as a free resource for university researchers and students at large.

Zdaly WorldData™ compiles over 3.3 billion world data and time series trends that can be visualized, merged and correlated with built-in statistical models.

Researchers can search, visualize and model important time series trends across multiple dimensions and sources in a single research platform. Data collections cover macroeconomics, demographics, finance, labor, agriculture, healthcare, trade, population and other major sectors important to academic, statistics and quantitative research.

For example, researchers studying infant mortality rates can instantly visualize historical datasets by region, then overlay related factors to plot anomalies, outliers and correlations in minutes.

“The massive troves of the world’s public data are a powerful force of public truth and accountability, playing a critical role in academic research. Yet this data is scattered, hard to source, debug and use – so Zdaly set out to solve this problem”, stated Raj Golecha, CEO of Zdaly.

“What costs our corporate customers six-figures to access, we’re proud to make available to academia free and help advance the efforts of university researchers and students everywhere”, added Golecha.

“University researchers no longer have to wade through disparate, unstructured data sources to prepare the data they need to do their work”, stated Rohit Kelkar, Head of Technology for Zdaly. “Zdaly’s unified data platform cuts data collection and preparation time by half or more, so researchers can focus on analysis and discovery”, added Kelkar.

Zdaly WorldData™ hosts many multiple terabytes of public data sets spanning 25-year moving averages. Full data access and statistical modeling features are available at no cost for all university researchers and students. For more information visit worlddata.zdaly.com.

Library Science or department heads interested in obtaining campus wide deployment instructions can email edu@zdaly.com.

About Zdaly
Revolutionizing big data analytics, Zdaly offers an Augmented Intelligence platform that unifies data science, machine learning and billions of world time series trends to deliver breakthrough data discovery and insights. Our platform ingests, cleanses, classifies and correlates disparate big data to unlock hidden, predictive and actionable insights at scale. Business and strategy teams rely on Zdaly to expose and decipher deep market intelligence, optimize capex projects and seize new market opportunities. For more information visit worlddata.zdaly.com.

Media Inquiries:
Albert Lilly
Zdaly
albert.lilly@zdaly.com
512- 537-9417