Story Highlights
- 46% of Pac-12 graduates are deeply interested in their work
- Room to improve preparedness levels for life outside of college
With teams from the Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences playing Monday night in the college football national championship game, Gallup looks past the gridiron and reviews research from the Gallup-Purdue Index to gain a better understanding of the experiences alumni from those conferences' institutions had while attending their alma maters.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Working graduates of current Pacific-12 universities are generally more likely than graduates of large universities outside the conference to be positive about various aspects of the jobs they do. For example, almost half (46%) of working Pac-12 alumni strongly agree that they are deeply interested in the work that they do, compared with 42% of graduates of large universities outside the Pac-12.
The group of Pac-12 alumni includes graduates of the 12 current member schools Arizona, Arizona State, California, Colorado, Oregon, Oregon State, Southern California, Stanford, UCLA, Utah, Washington and Washington State. Pac-12 alumni are more likely to strongly agree that they are deeply interested in their work than are graduates of schools from similarly structured conferences, such as the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big 12 Conference, the Big Ten Conference and the Southeastern Conference.
The findings come from the Gallup-Purdue Index, a joint-research effort with Purdue University and Lumina Foundation to study the relationship between the college experience and college graduates' lives. The Gallup-Purdue Index is a comprehensive, nationally representative study of U.S. college graduates with Internet access. According to a 2013 Census Bureau report, 90% of college graduates in the U.S. have access to the Internet. Gallup conducted the Web study Feb. 4-March 7, 2014, with nearly 30,000 U.S. adults who had completed at least a bachelor's degree.
Pac-12 Graduates Report Feeling Less Prepared for Life Outside of College
While graduates of current Pac-12 schools are relatively positive about their current work lives, they are less likely to report that their university prepared them for life outside of college. One in four current Pac-12 alumni strongly agree that their university prepared them well for this, which is on par with the average for large universities outside of the Pac-12, but lower than the 31% among graduates of peer conferences.
Implications
There are positive workplace implications when employees say they have the ideal job for them and have the opportunity to do work in which they are deeply interested. But the 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index Report finds that the odds of being engaged at work, a positive professional outcome, are more than twice as high if graduates feel their school prepared them well for life outside of college, a current area of weakness for Pac-12 universities. While the findings may seem to counter previous studies, underlying factors may be at play that affect long-term outcomes for current Pac-12 alumni. The ability of alumni to participate in experiential learning -- such as an internship in which they are able to apply their classroom learning, or a project that took a semester or more to complete -- has been shown to strongly correlate with post-college outcomes.
Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup-Purdue Index study are based on Web interviews conducted Feb. 4- March 7, 2014, with a random sample of 29,560 respondents with a bachelor's degree or higher, aged 18 and older, with Internet access, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
For results based on the total sample size of 1,564 current Pac-12 alumni, the margin of sampling error is ±3.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
For results based on the total sample size of 19,240 large university graduates, the margin of sampling error is ±1.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
For results based on the total sample size of 5,603 peer conference alumni, the margin of sampling error is ±2.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
The Gallup-Purdue Index sample was compiled from two sources: the Gallup Panel and the Gallup Daily tracking survey.
The sample of Pac-12 alumni includes graduates of current 12 member schools Arizona, Arizona State, California, Colorado, Oregon, Oregon State, Southern California, Stanford, UCLA, Utah, Washington and Washington State.
Learn more about how the Gallup-Purdue Index works.
