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The purpose of this paper is to identify when students choose their major and when students become interested in a career field, to devise a supply chain management (SCM) talent outreach strategy.

A survey was administered to undergraduate students in SCM classes, and the responses were explored through multinomial logistic regression analyses.

The paper revealed that interest in the career field is a major factor in choosing a college degree, among other factors. The timing of when a student chooses a major is influenced by interest in the field and whether or not the student lived abroad. The career field chosen is influenced by race, by whether or not the student lived abroad and by prior experience. Outreach strategies to attract new talent to supply chain-related fields should start prior to a student entering college.

Results are based on a survey research with a limited geographic coverage, and the research is limited to investigating student whose college major is other than SCM, leaving opportunities for further research where the college major is SCM.

The authors provide original findings that improve outreach strategies to attract next generation supply chain talent. They also further the development of theory for the determinants of when a college major is selected and when interest in a career field begins.

The purpose of this article is examine some of the most successful contemporary global business leaders in relation to undergraduate institution and undergraduate major in order to examine the value and return of higher education programs for global business leadership. This is an important topic in the modern global context, as there continues to be an increasing global push toward deemphasizing and defunding liberal arts education in favor of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields for college and university students around the globe.

The educational backgrounds of the 2019 Fortune 50 CEOs were researched in relation to undergraduate institutions attended and undergraduate majors. The study also included an examination of graduate education, if applicable. Using available biographical information regarding the CEOs educational backgrounds, these business leaders were compared relative to the educational data.

An examination of the undergraduate educational backgrounds of the 2019 Fortune 50 CEOs revealed an exact split between 18 STEM majors, 18 liberal arts majors and 18 business majors, with 1 CEO who began university studies but did not graduate. Upon examination, it is also apparent that some majors were more directly related to a CEO's industry, while other majors ended up having little relation to the CEO's chosen career path.

The results of this study contribute to the very important discussion concerning the long-term value of a college education. At both micro and macro levels, stakeholders are constantly questioning the ultimate return on investment of a college education, and examination of the 2019 Fortune 50 CEOs indicates that the choice of college major is only one ingredient in the overall recipe for professional success. For these business leaders, there were a wide variety of educational paths, in terms of college academic preparations, that eventually led to the very pinnacle of professional and leadership attainment.

This study demonstrates that a particular undergraduate field of study is not going to make or break a career, and the examination of these Fortune 50 CEOs indicates that one's ultimate career achievement is not simply relegated to the specific field of undergraduate major.

This paper aims to identify career development theories that explain the intention to choose college majors in arts and design, to integrate the identified theories and to examine the relationships between determinants of the integrated model. In addition, this study attempts to identify the characteristics of the prospective arts and design students.

The literature review resulted in a multitheoretical framework named as PERISCOPE (Personality of Holland's RIASEC in Social Cognitive and Planned Behavior Theories) to reflect the theories it consisted of. This study collected data from Year 12 students in Surabaya (n = 163) and used PLS-SEM technique to assess the measurement model and the structural model of such framework.

The results revealed that the integrated model explains 57.8 percent of the variance of the intention to pursue arts and design majors. This paper hence improves the predictive ability of an earlier model by adding a further theory. In addition, this study identified characteristics of the prospective students and concluded that students with artistic personality will have better self-efficacy, which sequentially have perception that pursuing arts and design majors will not be challenging, thus increases their intention to pursue such majors.

This study demonstrated that PERISCOPE framework is better in terms of predictive power in understanding the college major choice in arts and design. As a result, this study adds to the current body of knowledge in the field of college major choice, which was found to be lacking.

Enrolling in an academic discipline or selecting the college major choice is a dynamic process. Very few studies examine this aspect in India. This paper makes a humble attempt to fill this gap using NSSO 71st round data on social consumption on education. The purpose of this paper is to use multinomial regression model to study the different factors that influence course choice in higher education. The different factors (given the availability of information) considered relate to ability, gender, cost of higher education, socio-economic and geographical location. The results indicate that gender polarization is apparent between humanities and engineering. The predicated probabilities bring out the dichotomy between the choice of courses and levels of living expressed through consumption expenditures in terms of professional and non-professional courses. Predicted probabilities of course choices bring in a clear distinction between south and west regions preferring engineering and other professional courses, whereas north, east and NES prefer humanities.

The present paper follows the same approach as that of Turner and Bowen (1999). The Multinomial regression is specified as P ( M i = j ) = ( exp ( β j × X i ) / ∑ j − 1 5 exp ( β j × X i ) ) , where P (M_i=j) denotes the probability of choosing outcome j, the particular course/major choice that categorizes different disciplines. This response variable is specified with five categories: such as medicine, engineering, other professional courses, science and humanities. The authors’ primary interest is to determine the factors governing an individual’s decision to choose a particular subject field as compared to humanities. In other words, to make the system identifiable in the MLR, humanities is treated as a reference category. The vector X_i includes the set of explanatory variables and β_j refers to the corresponding coefficients for each of the outcome j. From an aggregate perspective, the distribution of course choices is an important input to the skill (technical skills) composition of future workforce. In that sense, except humanities, the rest of the courses are technical-intensive courses; hence, humanities is treated as a reference category.

The results indicate that gender polarization is apparent between humanities and engineering. The predicated probabilities bring out the dichotomy between the choice of courses and levels of living expressed through consumption expenditures in terms of professional and non-professional courses. Predicted probabilities of course choices bring in a clear distinction between south and west regions preferring engineering and other professional courses, whereas north, east and NES prefer humanities.

Predicted probabilities of course choices bring in a clear distinction between south and west regions preferring engineering and other professional courses, whereas north, east and NES prefer humanities. This course and regional imbalance need to be worked with multi-pronged strategies of providing both access to education and employment opportunities in other states. But the predicted probabilities of medicine and science remain similar across the board. Very few research studies on the determinants of field choice in higher education prevail in India. Research studies on returns to education by field or course choices hardly exist in India. These evidences are particularly important to know which course choices can support student loans, which can be the future area of work.

The research evidence is particularly important to know which course choices can support student loans, which can be the future area of work, as well as how to address the gender bias in the course choices.

The paper has social implications in terms of giving insights into the course choices of students. These findings bring in implications for practice in their ability to predict the demand for course choices and their share of demand, not only in the labor market but also across regions. India has 36 states/UTs and each state/UT has a huge population size and large geographical areas. The choice of course has state-specific influence because of nature of state economy, society, culture and inherent education systems. Further, within the states, rural and urban variation has also a serious influence on the choice of courses.

The present study is a value addition on three counts. First, the choice of courses includes the recent trends in the preference over market-oriented/technical courses such as medicine, engineering and other professional courses (chartered accountancy and similar courses, courses from Industrial Training Institute, recognized vocational training institute, etc.). The choice of market-oriented courses has been examined in relation to the choice of conventional subjects. Second, the socio-economic background of students plays a significant role in the choice of courses. Third, the present paper uses the latest data on Social Consumption on Education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends of Cambodian government scholarship students’ choice of academic major; the significant association between family socioeconomic status (SES) and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors, and the patterns of STEM major choices across demographic and geographical characteristics.

Descriptive analysis and cross-tabulation statistical tests were employed to analyze the data of 1,000 students drawn from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport scholarships database of 2018. The study employed a correlational study design.

Findings revealed that the Cambodian government scholarship students were more inclined to major in social science than science and engineering-related fields. Findings also positioned that students’ choice of STEM majors was significantly associated with family SES, gender and locality. Students from families with higher SES, male students and students from the provinces were more likely to choose STEM majors than their counterparts.

These findings point to some practical considerations on how to maximize low SES students’ enrollment in STEM majors at a higher education of Cambodia.

Crises influence individuals’ career development. The COVID-19 crisis has global impacts in financial, health and social aspects and service industries are at the forefront of the pervasive impacts. This study investigated how college students’ perceptions of COVID-19 interplayed with self-efficacy on their academic plans and further identified major differences between students in service-oriented and nonservice-oriented majors.

A self-administered online survey was conducted with 299 undergraduates at a large Midwestern university during COVID-19. Regression analyses, including conditional analyses, examined the study hypotheses using SPSS.

The results showed that, in general, students’ self-efficacy reduced their intentions to change their academic majors. The joint effects of self-efficacy and perception of COVID-19 diverged among students in nonservice-oriented majors but converged among students in service-oriented majors (e.g. hospitality and tourism). These students in the service fields showed more commitment to their current majors even as their concerns about the social implications of COVID-19 increased.

This study suggests that academic institutions should try to improve students’ self-efficacy to maintain their career commitments during crisis times. Furthermore, service organizations should highlight the importance of social aspects as recovery from COVID-19 begins as a tool to recruit college graduates.

The literature on career decisions of students in service industries is quite limited. This study enriches the body of career decisions research in the context of service management by highlighting how service sectors are influenced by COVID-19.

This study aims to analyze the wage differentials of the majors in college education in Turkey, which is a country implementing an ongoing expansion in college education in recent years.

The study implements Mincreian wage regression using ordinary least squares, Heckman two-step estimation and quantile regression with sample selection correction by using household labor force surveys of TurkStat from the years 2014–2017.

The findings indicate one of the highest heterogeneity, close to 0.50 log points, between majors in the literature. The within-heterogeneity created by majors is highest among the graduates of social-behavioral sciences, law, biology, physics, mathematics, statistics, computer, engineering and manufacturing, as shown by a 90–10 difference, which is almost 700% for some of these majors. This study shows that the natural science and technical majors that are expected to be more productive and to be paid more fall behind in the wage distribution.

Estimation results show that natural science majors, except for subjects allied to medicine and engineering, are paid lower than law and service-sector-related majors. This indicates that the predictions of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis are not valid in the wage profiles in Turkey and that some majors supply more than the sectoral needs. This casts doubts on the effectiveness of the ongoing higher education expansion process of the country.

This study contributes to the literature on wage differentials of college majors, an area with limited studies. This is the first study analyzing wage differentials of the field of studies by correcting sample selection bias for the Turkish case.

This paper aims to extend the scope of previous studies on education-occupation mismatch to explicitly focus on the role high school track choices have on the risk of being mismatched in the labor market.

The paper uses the most exhaustive available database regarding the early-career paths of university graduates in Romania. Using a novel matching technique, entropy balancing (EB), our study relies on multinomial logit models and logit regressions to estimate the effect of the completed high school track on the likelihood of being mismatched in the labor market. The empirical analysis focuses on two types of education-occupation mismatches: horizontal and vertical mismatches.

We show that studying a different field in college compared to the completed high school track increases the risk of being skill mismatched in the first job after graduation. Five years after college graduation, the influence of the high school track fades, while being skill mismatched in the first employment plays a more important role. In contrast, we find no evidence that pursuing a college major unrelated to the completed high school track increases the probability of being overeducated. However, being overeducated in the first job increases the risk of being overeducated five years later.

The study brings new reliable evidence on the extent to which high school track choices may contribute to the risk of being mismatched in the labor market.

Managers in higher education require cost effective ways to attract the optimal number of students. The purpose of this paper is to address that general problem at the college level, and in doing so, it points toward strategies that could also be relevant at university and at national level. Two crucial issues are whether potential students are more influenced by parents or by peers when it comes to choosing a college; and whether spending money on advertising is more efficacious than spending money on making direct contact with potential students. The findings provide essential market intelligence for strategically managing the scarce resources available for attracting students.

Data were gathered through a survey instrument and the partial least squares (PLS) technique was subsequently applied to 314 responses.

Secondary school guidance counselors, followed by current and previous college students were the highlights in order of magnitude for non-marketing information sources for college choice. Social life received the highest loadings among college attributes and phone calls from the admissions office received the highest loading among marketer controlled variables. The results reflect the nature of Chinese culture, which is regarded as being highly collectivist.

The model proposed in this study is applicable to students of sub-degree courses, but may need to be adapted to degree and postgraduate courses students.

This study helps educational managers to identify which factors most strongly influence choice of higher education provider, and as a consequence enable managers to make more strategic use of scarce resources.

This is one of very few studies which employ PLS analysis to discover the key factors that influence student selection of a higher education provider, and one of few studies that focusses on Hong Kong.

Social cognitive career theory (“SCCT”) suggests that positive feedback can influence educational choices. Introductory courses often provide students with their first opportunity to obtain feedback in a given discipline. As a result, SCCT hypothesizes that introductory courses grades will impact a student's decision to major in a given discipline. The purpose of this paper is to explore this hypothesis in the accounting domain.

Longitudinal data were collected from four cohorts of students registered at a Canadian university. The main hypothesis is tested by estimating a logistic regression.

A significant positive relationship is found between a student's introductory financial accounting (“IFA”) course grade and their decision to major in accounting. This decision to major in the discipline is not found to be affected by various student (e.g. biological sex or age) or instructor (e.g. whether the instructor holds a CPA designation or not) characteristics.

This study supports seminal and enduring research that emphasizes the IFA course as a gateway into the accounting major. As a result, educators should consider these findings when designing their IFA courses and the related student supports embedded within the IFA course.

Prior literature offers conflicting results on the relationship between IFA grades and student's choice to major in accounting. This study relies upon a theoretical framework, SCCT, to settle the debate. This study further extends the prior literature by exploring the impact of various student and instructor characteristics on the relationship between IFA grades and student's choice to major in accounting.