Big Chill for Class of ’91 : Jobs: Prospective employers are less willing to take a risk on a graduating senior whose academic record was good, but not great.
At last week’s graduation, 23-year-old Jennifer Younge tucked her diploma under her arm, shook hands with the Cal State Long Beach business school dean--and headed straight into one of the bleakest job markets for college graduates in decades.
At any other time, Younge, an articulate business marketing major with job experience and a “B” average, would have had her hands full of offers. Now, unable to find a job, she is competing with professionals for an advertising agency three-month internship that pays $100 a week for expenses and gas.
As the recession wends into its second summer, college graduates are finding the doors to businesses, large and small, shut tight. Edward H. Babbush, the director of the Career Development Center at Cal State Long Beach since 1963, said this is the toughest year CSULB students have had finding jobs in the 30 years he has headed the center.
“It isn’t that these kids are meatballs or nerds,” Babbush said. “These are sharp kids who are having a tough time. . . . There is just nothing going on anywhere.”
A nationwide study by Michigan State University concluded that the job market for this year’s graduating seniors is the bleakest in 20 years.
Locally, companies that once scoured the campuses of CSULB, Whittier College and Biola University for employees are now turning their backs, saying they have no job openings. Of the companies that are recruiting, few are actually hiring and many have slashed the number of job openings.
“I’ve found a lot of people out there don’t want to train--they are looking for people who can produce immediately,” Younge lamented. “It doesn’t seem a college education is enough any more.”
JC Penney, for example, hired 26 interns last year and will cut back to 22 this year. And it has reduced the number of trainee positions from 27 to 20, district personnel manager Dick Stager said.
When he goes to a college campus to look for prospective employees, Stager said, he groups students into three categories. “The ‘A’ population everyone wants,” he said. “The ‘C’ population would have a difficult time getting a job no matter what the economic climate. The ‘B’ population is the one that is probably most affected by the recession. They are the students whose grades weren’t as good. Maybe their student participation wasn’t as great, but I may have gotten a gut feeling about them, something that would have led me to take a chance. Now, I probably wouldn’t hire them. The risk factor is too high.”
When the recession hit, it was too late for 28-year-old CSULB student Robert Oyama to make marked improvements in his grade-point average or become suddenly involved in student groups. With a low “B” average, Oyama, an electrical engineer with practical computer experience, found himself without a single job offer when he received his diploma last week.
“Right now, companies are really pulling the cream of the crop, and the average person like me is having a hard time,” Oyama said. “With an engineering degree, I thought I wouldn’t have a problem. I’m looking for $27,000 or so. I know I could get a job for $17,000 or $18,000 a year, but that’s really hard to live on. After spending all that money for tuition and books, it’s kind of discouraging.”
University career-placement directors and recruiters said that even those students who are academic stars and who would usually be gobbled up by companies are having tough times as layoffs increase and the shrinking job market drives older, more experienced workers to the same interviews as college students.
Sue Lipovski, a recruiter for Northwest Mutual Insurance Co., has been inundated with resumes, not only from students but from people who graduated years ahead of them.
“I went to an alumni career fair and came back with half a phone book stack of resumes,” she said. The experienced salesperson has a slight edge over the college graduate, Lipovski said.
The insurance and retail industries have benefited from the shortage of jobs in other areas. In healthy economic times, neither would be getting an overflow of applications from top-caliber students, but recruiters in these industries say some of the best students now are knocking on their doors.
“There are some advantages to this recession,” Stager said drolly. “We can really fill our coffers with top-notch people.”
CSULB’s Babbush said, however, that many students such as Younge will end up “underemployed.” They will take internships though they are capable of handling the responsibilities of a full-time position. They will work for lowly wages and take on tasks for which they are overqualified just to get a foot into the door, he said.
But some like Oyama are unwilling to lower their sights, even temporarily. He plans to search for an engineering job through the next fall. If nothing turns up, he said, he will probably go to graduate school.
In fact, Oyama is one of a growing number of students who are thinking about enrolling in graduate school to sit out the recession rather than hunt for work.
Last fall, enrollment in Cal State Long Beach graduate programs jumped by 11.4% over enrollment the previous fall. Graduate enrollment jumped 50% among students who majored in fine arts. Keith Polakoff, the dean of graduate studies, says the sagging economy is one of the reasons.
Many graduating students did not realize until it was too late how difficult a job search during a recession can be, college officials said. Some have been so caught up in the day-to-day pressures of completing their final year of college that they put off their job search until the last moment.
“Everything is hectic for them, and they are so pressured for time that the thought of trying to find a job is like a job in itself,” said Jeanne Back, the director of career services at Biola University in La Mirada.
Career-placement directors said that the best opportunities lie in the health sciences fields, environmental engineering, banking, finance, insurance and service industries. Back said that of the 300 students who will graduate from Biola on Monday, nursing students were among those who had the least trouble finding work. Most of the accounting majors had found jobs, though some were still searching this spring. In past years, she said, accounting majors typically had jobs lined up by November.
Only the brightest, most assertive and prepared students will wedge their way into fields such as electronics, manufacturing and communications, which have been hardest hit by the recession, recruiters and placement directors said. Because of the state’s financial crisis, government and school jobs are also hard to come by, they said.
But no matter what the economic conditions are, graduates should never sit back and wait for job offers to come pouring in, recruiters say.
“Students have to sell themselves to the recruiter,” said JC Penney’s Stager. “They have taken four or five years getting ready for their careers, they have to take five or 10 minutes to get ready to sell themselves. If they are not prepared for an interview, it doesn’t matter whether there are five or 500 guys trying for the same job.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I would ask an applicant: ‘How much do you know about JC Penney?’ and the response is, ‘Well, I shop there.’ ”
Community correspondent Leta Lynde contributed to this story.
CSULB Graduate School Enrollment
The following chart shows the increase in graduate school enrollment at Cal State Long Beach from 1989 to 1990. The numbers show candidates for graduate degrees only. Students seeking a second bachelor’s degree, certificate or teaching credential have been excluded.
Curriculum Area Fall 1989 Fall 1990 % Change Health Sciences 592 715 20.78 Other Applied Arts 97 120 23.71 Business Administration 536 604 12.69 Education 569 590 3.69 Engineering 795 846 6.42 Fine Arts 129 193 49.61 Humanities 300 339 13.00 Natural Sciences 178 155 -12.92 Public Administration 311 364 17.04 Social and Behavioral Studies 413 434 5.08 Interdisciplinary Studies 10 18 80.00 Total 3,930 4,378 11.40
Source: Cal State Long Beach
