McFUTURE SHOCK : FACED WITH FEWER JOBS AND LOWER SALARIES, THIS YEAR’S COLLEGE GRADUATES MAY HAVE TO SETTLE FOR A MERE PAYCHECK. ANY PAYCHECK.

WHEN THE CLASS of 1992 entered college as freshmen, unemployment was at a 14-year low. Michael Milken had just pulled down a $550-million salary, Donald Trump was still playing monopoly with the streets of mid-town Manhattan, and Pete Rose was best known for passing Ty Cobb’s all-time hit record. Pan American dominated international air travel, and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. still had $1.7 billion in assets.

When they graduate this month, the class of 1992 will face the worst job market in 20 years. Milken is in a federal prison work camp in Pleasanton. Trump is in bankruptcy court. Rose has been barred from baseball and baseball’s Hall of Fame. Pan Am is one in a long string of respected companies to have collapsed. And FSLIC has disappeared under the weight of a $200-billion-plus bailout tab.

Even as incoming freshmen, they experienced uncertainties about the economy--and a nagging feeling that only the generation’s super-achievers would be able to match their parents’ standards of living. As a result, record levels of stress and depression afflicted them, says Alexander W. Astin, a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education who conducts an annual survey of students at about 600 campuses nationwide. Four years later, these young people have much more to worry about.

Northwestern University researchers, drawing from a survey of 259 companies, found that hiring this spring is off 30% from 1989. Major corporations--many in the midst of massive layoffs or hiring freezes--have sharply curtailed their recruitment of college graduates. Some recruiters are going through the motions of interviewing students even when they have no jobs to offer. Hardest hit this year will be economics and finance graduates, followed by business and liberal arts majors. There are also fewer jobs for engineers and math majors. The major exceptions are computer science and chemistry graduates; both will find more jobs available this year than in 1991.

The days when a college graduate could segue from the shelter of academia to the cocoon of a big corporation offering job security, steady promotion and an array of benefits are dwindling fast. The greatest job growth is among smaller and mid-size companies that offer risk and not a whole lot of benefits. And most graduating students aren’t even equipped to find those jobs--prompting career counselors nationwide to preach such concepts as “entrepreneurism,” “networking” and “packaging” to job-hungry students.

The news on salaries is equally grim. A study last month by the Economic Policy Institute found that since 1987 the pay of college-educated workers has failed to keep up with inflation. And many economists expect that lag to continue even beyond the recession.

Economic hard times can leave a sharp imprint on the lives of young people. Sociologists note that the Depression turned most of one generation into Democrats, and they remained so even as their financial fortunes skyrocketed. The class of ’92 comes at the tail end of what novelist Douglas Coupland calls Generation X, those 41 million post-baby-boomers born between 1961 and 1971 who are cynical about the future and bitter about the low-paying “McJobs” they are forced to hold down.

The attitudes of these graduates are rife with contradictions. During their four or five years in college, campus activism began to creep upward after a long decline. Concern about the environment shot up. Support for women’s rights continued to grow, too. But positions on crime and drugs moved to the right. Students became more interested in professions such as teaching and nursing and slightly less interested in business. But big paychecks stayed at the top of most students’ wish lists. “College graduates today remain far more oriented toward making money than 20 years ago,” Astin says.

But if hours of interviews with seven members of UCLA’s class of ’92 are any indication, today’s graduates see making money as the key to stability in an unstable world--a world they may want to fix, brick by brick, but don’t dare hope to rebuild. During the past three months, these students agreed to share their struggles to find jobs--and to explore how these economic bad times have shaped what they want out of life. Their stories are almost as diverse as the university’s student body: Teresa Garcia is an immigrant from Mexico who broke with family tradition by going to college. Alanna Klein and Jessica Lindzy are Pi Beta Phi sorority sisters and roommates whose comfortable home lives can be traced partly to the booming real estate market of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Sherrick Murdoff is the son of schoolteachers who worry about how the vagaries of the economy will affect their son’s career.

Walter Sylvester--his mother is a lawyer, his father a school principal--is an engineering major who sees himself as a role model for younger African-American men. Ben Wexler, son of a lawyer and a nursing-home administrator, was looking to Hollywood as much as Westwood when he moved here from a comfortable Chicago suburb. And James Papp, the only graduate student of the group, has undergone a long and difficult inner struggle that may lead him away from the academic world he once longed to be part of.

All of these students have one thing in common: They walked onto the sprawling Westwood campus four or five years ago with the conviction that a UCLA degree would translate into success in the job market. Now they’re learning some hard lessons. Recruitment interviews at UCLA’s campus are off 8% over the past two years, words like crisis infuse job-planning seminars, and career counselors report high levels of stress among graduating students because of the shrinking job market. As he walks through the placement and career-planning center he oversees, Walter Brown sadly shakes his head. “It’s not good, not good,” he says. The job boards stand half empty. And many of the postings are for clerical jobs paying $6 or $7 an hour. Career counselor Maciek Kolodziejczak notes that the biggest problem for UCLA graduates is not unemployment but underemployment. McJobs.

DESPITE THIS BLEAK NEWS, SPIRITS WERE HIGH WHEN THE SEVEN graduates sat down together for pizza one cool April night. Spring break was a fresh memory, and the ritual partying that marks the first weeks of spring quarter was in full swing. But it didn’t take long for their anxieties about the future to surface.

How would you describe your own mood last summer, compared to now?

Jessica Lindzy: I was optimistic. I thought it would be so cut - and - dried--that I’d go in, do the interview thing and get a job. I knew it would be hard; I didn’t think it would be impossible.

Alanna Klein: At times you have to remind yourself you’re a good person.

Teresa Garcia: I thought I’d be choosing between offers. Now I just want an engineering job . I’m not going to be so picky anymore. I try to be optimistic, but it’s hard.

James Papp: I knew the Ph . D . market was really bad. But one knew of people who had got jobs--at least one had heard of people who had got jobs. I thought that if I did everything the right way, if I got out in five (instead of eight or nine or 10) years, got my dissertation done, got some publications, got some awards--that it all meant something, that there is some sort of relationship between what you do and what you get.

THEY’RE NO LONGER APOCRYPHAL, THOSE ENDLESS STORIES about the Ph.D. who can only find a job driving a cab or flipping hamburgers or pumping gas in a country allegedly desperate for more educated minds. James Papp, Ph.D., English, may forgo the academic job market for a different kind of vocation: Jesuit priest.

It’s not an alternative to a recessionary job market, exactly. Papp first felt the calling a couple of years ago. He initially had planned to get some “real world” experience before pursuing his vows--and he still may have to, owing to church rules and his own continued internal debate over his vocation. As the months of job searching wore on, though, skipping that first step certainly looked like the more appealing route.

Inside a stark campus office one March morning, Papp holds up a copy of the Modern Language Assn.’s employment catalogue, the bible for doctoral candidates entering the job market. This is the October, 1991, issue: It has 600 job listings. The October, 1990, issue had 900. Papp applied for 40 jobs. The competition was stiff: Papp was among 450 applicants responding to a Vassar College opening in 20th-Century British literature. Fifteen were called for interviews. Papp was among them. He didn’t get the job. Rejections rolled in. Several positions were cut or frozen before interviews could even begin.

“I applied to Fordham. They got 350 applications for a job that no longer exists. Even at Caltech, which is usually rolling in money, there was a job I would have loved: teaching in 20th-Century British and American literature. But (the position) didn’t get funding.”

And on and on the story goes, as told by this son of a retired sheet-metal worker and a former nurse from San Diego. Papp’s biggest problem is timing, according to Carol Kleiman, author of “The 100 Best Jobs for the 1990s and Beyond.” The job market for Ph.D.’s will, she says, improve dramatically in five to 10 years, as an aging college faculty begins to retire. That doesn’t help now.

Papp, who somehow acquired an upper-crust accent and a habit of veering off on long tangents about obscure Victorian writers, wrote his dissertation on parody, principally in 19th- and 20th-Century literature. He manages to find plenty of humor in his own situation. He describes himself and his three older sisters--who have among them advanced degrees in mathematics, plant physiology, education and more--as “overeducated people who can’t get jobs. What my parents really want are grandchildren. All we give them are degrees.”

Of the paradoxical trends pollsters are finding among young adults--a sense of social commitment growing side by side with an unwavering belief in American-style materialism--Papp represents the first. He grew up attending various Protestant churches, but during his college years, he began searching for a faith that involved “a strong sense of commitment to the real world, beyond popping off to church on Sunday and drinking coffee afterward.”

Eventually, Papp found the social commitment and firm belief system he was seeking in the Roman Catholic Church. Two years ago he converted. Shortly after, he began exploring the priesthood.

Now all he has to do is tell his parents.

What kind of pressure are you getting from your parents as graduation approaches?

Alanna Klein: My parents totally understand what’s going on out there. My mom didn’t expect me to have a job for a long time.

Sherrick Murdoff: My mom was very insecure. When I got a job offer, she said, “Oh my God, take it right now.”

Teresa Garcia: Everyone has me up there on a pedestal because I’m the youngest and the first one in the family to go to college. All my brothers and sisters, and my mom, they’re so proud of me. They can say, “Oh, she’s an engineer.” But I keep thinking, “When am I going to be able to call them and tell them I have a job?”

EXPECTATIONS ARE HIGH ON TERESA GARCIA’S MIND NOW THAT she is the proud owner of a civil-engineering degree from one of America’s most prestigious universities. She recalls the expectations that her six brothers and sisters had for her: that she would--like they did--marry young, bear children and work some minimum-wage job in the little farm town of Dinuba, near Fresno, where she spent her teen-age years as a shy girl from Guanajuato, Mexico, who spoke only broken English.

She recalls the expectations that her father--still working at a Mexican textile plant--had for her: that she wouldn’t finish college, that she’d get pregnant and drop out. And she recalls the expectations she had for herself: that she’d sweat through the grueling physics and math courses, and it would all pay off handsomely with a string of high-paying job offers.

She’s proved her family wrong. But now, without a job offer, she’s having trouble realizing her own ambitions. “I feel cheated,” says Garcia, who often talks as if there are exclamation points built into the ends of her sentences. “I’ve been in school five years and two quarters. During that time I thought, my God, is there anything else I can study? I liked engineering, but it was so hard! But when I first came to UCLA, my adviser said not to worry, that companies will come to you, you don’t have to go to them.”

A civil-engineering degree, like other engineering degrees, remains one of the most valuable credentials a college graduate can have. But graduates, particularly in recession-plagued Los Angeles, need to look beyond their own communities, says Carol Kleiman. That’s not an easy step for Garcia. It was only her ambition to “be somebody”--a dream that evolved from interior decorator to architect to builder--that gave her the fortitude to leave her close-knit family and move first to UC Santa Cruz and later to UCLA. She’s not sure how much farther she’s prepared to go.

One thing she does know: She wants to make money, lots of it, and she’s not going to do it picking tomatoes. Comfortable do-gooders may wince at Garcia’s lustful talk of material wants. But after defying her family’s expectations, after working two jobs simultaneously to supplement her financial aid, after all those final exams, Garcia wants her reward. After all, isn’t this the kind of single-minded ambition America expects of its immigrants?

How important to you are the amenities of life--a nice car, a nice house?

Sherrick Murdoff: Pretty important.

Teresa Garcia: I hate to say it, I feel bad sometimes, but I’m very material. I’ll have the best car I can have; maybe I’ll even have more debts than I can afford. I already know what kind of car I want to buy this year.

What’s that?

Garcia: A new Z.

Do all of you feel that way?

Walter Sylvester: Yeah, like a house, that’s important.

Alanna Klein: Something I’m coming to realize is that you have to start at the bottom. I was living under the illusion that you’re going to join the company and get top salary. I look at my parents and their friends. I want to live like them, but they’ve been working for 30 years. I never saw them when they were starving and living in that little apartment.

When you look around at your parents and older friends, how would you live your lives differently?

Klein: I want to live my parents’ life.

Sylvester: Yeah, at least.

Klein: I want to be my mom.

Ben Wexler: You’d probably end up being your mom even if you didn’t want to.

LIKE A LOT OF COLLEGE STUDENTS TODAY, ALANNA KLEIN admires her parents and the financially comfortable lives they lead. Rebellion hasn’t been a strong trend on campus for more than a decade.

Klein describes her mother, a part-time pharmacist with a rich community life in the Bay Area’s tony town of Hillsborough, as a woman of determination and drive. “She’s basically done what she wanted to with her life,” she says. “She found a good balance. She’s traveled a lot. She has a wonderful marriage. Everything is really secure about her life.”

Security is a word that comes up frequently when talking to these students. As pleasant as her mother’s life is, Klein is quick to note her mother’s good fortune in having a husband whose success in real estate and insurance created so many opportunities. Klein’s maternal grandparents weren’t so lucky: They lost everything when they fled Germany during the Holocaust, and Klein remains acutely aware of their struggle to build new lives in this country.

Three months ago, Klein felt both fearful and cheated about her impending graduation. Fearful that despite her many interviews with major companies, she wouldn’t get a job offer. (The rejection letters had been coming since fall.) Cheated that her sociology major with emphasis on business and her work in student government seemed to mean so little in today’s job market. “I just want some stability in my life,” she says, her emotions running high in her sorority house, elegantly appointed with chintz sofas and meticulously manicured front gardens.

But there was something besides fear and frustration in Klein’s blue eyes that day: nascent ambition. At 22, her insecurity and openness lend her a soft finish. When she is 35, you won’t want to mess with her. This is a young woman who is fast becoming accustomed to--and comfortable with--competition. That drive paid off in April, when Klein got her first job offer: management trainee at Bullock’s. Three weeks later she had her second offer, from Macy’s. (A sign of the times: R.H. Macy & Co. Inc., owner of both stores, is undergoing reorganization in Chapter 11 bankruptcy court.)

Klein’s a beach rat who loves Los Angeles, but she thinks the Macy’s position in San Francisco, paying in the high-$20,000 range, provides the better opportunity. If all goes as planned, Klein hopes to open her own store one day. “I’m really excited about getting my career underway,” she says, breathless at the prospect.

Ben Wexler: I’ve always gotten the impression from my parents that work is something you have to do , and it doesn’t really matter whether you like it or not. I don’t want to paint a real gloomy picture of them, but I really don’t think they like their jobs very much. A lot of times I dread life after college.

Sherrick Murdoff: My mom, especially, she’s a schoolteacher, and the only reason she does it is to get us through school. My parents are very into responsibility, that you work as much as possible. Doing what you want to do is very important to me. You have to enjoy your work. I wish my mom would go off into something else, just take the risk and do it. But she’ll probably stick with teaching until she retires.

SHERRICK MURDOFF MAY NOT SEE IT, BUT HE INHERITED MUCH OF that same proclivity toward responsibility. Don’t be fooled by those empty beer bottles lining the bar in his cramped Theta Xi fraternity room: Murdoff likes to party, but two years ago he led a controversial effort to restrict alcohol use on Frat Row. “The alcohol was out of control,” he says. “I didn’t want us to make the papers because of a death or a large accident.”

Murdoff spent his time at UCLA meticulously building a heavy-duty resume: business economics major fluent in three software languages, vice president of UCLA’s undergraduate student government, president of the Interfraternity Council, computer/management consultant to small business. He loves to analyze corporate balance sheets; as it happens, that’s one of the growth opportunities in the ‘90s, according to Kleiman.

On the first day of the fall quarter, when most students were still buying their books and scouting their class routes, Murdoff walked into the campus career center and signed on for 10 interviews. By February he had the offer he wanted--as a $34,000-a-year management consultant for Price Waterhouse & Co. in San Francisco. His schoolteacher mother and college-professor father, who still live in his hometown of Stockton, were relieved.

At first, this former varsity water-polo player sounds like any of the thousands of career-hungry graduates who poured out of business schools in the heady atmosphere of the 1980s. In fact, his values more closely mirror those of his college peers in 1992, who are wary about pursuing the fast bucks on Wall Street. Business students like Murdoff not only watched America’s high fliers go down in flames but also studied their mistakes in class. And with all the layoffs on Wall Street, Murdoff and his peers learned another lesson: Working 80 hours a week is no guarantee of job security.

So when New York investment banks came to call at UCLA--offering the Price Waterhouse salary but more in bonuses--Murdoff interviewed with them but decided they weren’t going to be his first choice. “It’s glamorous and exciting,” he says, “but there would be no time to enjoy life and no guarantee of anything.”

Eventually, Murdoff wants to run his own company. But not now. Not in this economy.

Has the recession made any of you less willing to take risks?

Sherrick Murdoff: Yeah, I had the opportunity with a friend of mine to start a computer program company from the ground floor. But I’m kind of like my mom, I guess. I want to start making my own money with a job that’s firmly in place.

Jessica Lindzy: I identify more with my mom (than my dad). She’s very independent, started her own company. But I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes right now in this economy. She’s not having a good time. I think that’s what pushes me into wanting a stable company, a stable life, knowing what I want to do and sticking with it as long as it makes me happy.

WHAT MAKES JESSICA LINDZY HAPPY RIGHT NOW IS THE thought that she doesn’t have to look for a job--at least until next year. After a round of on-campus interviews but no job offers, Lindzy decided to ship off to Tahoe for the summer with her twin sister, to wait tables and have some fun. After that, she’s hoping her father will help finance three months of traveling--then she’s back to Tahoe for a winter of skiing and work.

But Lindzy would prefer to get her career underway. It was only in early April, after one too many rejection letters, that she decided to postpone her job search until the economy improved. “It wasn’t even an option until I thought, ‘I’m not going to have anything to do,’ ” she says.

There’s a reason for Lindzy’s fear about plunging into this economy: For the last three years, she has watched her mother’s financial fortunes sink as she lost money on the Newport Beach luxury homes that she built to sell. That stands in sharp contrast to the 1980s, when, as a divorced mother of three, she made a comfortable living as an industrial real estate broker.

Growing up in the Bay Area, “money was never a problem,” Lindzy recalls. But with the change in her mother’s finances and the expense of college, money is much on Lindzy’s mind these days. She’s working part-time as a receptionist and is nervously awaiting the day in June when her father’s $150-a-month check stops coming.

Lindzy majored in business economics, but she’s not sure what she wants to do with her life. Initially she was attracted to the prestige and glamour of law (she admits to being an “L.A. Law” addict) but changed her mind as the profession began to fall out of fashion on campuses. “There’s a real stigma to being a lawyer now,” she says. “I can’t say specifically what I want to do, but I want to be successful and work my way up the ladder. I want a stable life; I don’t want to have to worry about money; I don’t want to be laid off.”

Have any of the rest of you thought of postponing your careers to see the world or try something else?

Sherrick Murdoff: I wanted to go to Europe, just for the summer. But my parents were like, “Why?”

Walter Sylvester: My dad would never . . . if I said I wanted to go travel for a year, he would kill me. Seriously. It’s hard enough to tell him I don’t want to work in engineering. He’s like, “What are you doing? What are you thinking?” If I said I was going to travel for a little bit, he’d be like, “You’ve lost it! I sent you to college for this?”

WALTER SYLVESTER never intended to pursue a career as a hands-on engineer, despite his mechanical-engineering major. He had planned to “inspire” and manage the engineers who design American cars. But unlike Detroit’s MBA’s and marketing mavens, Sylvester wanted to understand the technology he was managing. “I wanted to get American cars back on the road,” he says. “I wanted to be the next Iacocca.”

It was an ‘80s-style expression of “political action” for a young man graduating from high school in Davis, the son of a junior high principal and an attorney. But midway through UCLA, Sylvester changed course. Consumed with a love for sports--especially baseball--he instead decided he wanted to become the next Whitey Herzog.

Mechanical engineering is not exactly ideal training for sports management. But Sylvester figured that if he landed a marketing job--even related to engineering--it would be good training for a front-office job in the major leagues. He’s one of those carefully ambitious people who set two- and five-year plans, and a marketing job leading to an MBA, leading to a sports management job, would fit nicely into his current game plan.

Sylvester is accustomed to getting what he wants: honors, scholarships, top offices at Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and the National Society of Black Engineers, a slot in IBM’s selective summer training program. So the difficulties of the job search threw him for a loop. “I thought I’d have at least three job offers by spring break,” he says. “And that was when I planned to do some soul searching--over what’s most beneficial to me, where can I advance the quickest, where can I contribute the most to the company. Now I don’t have that option.”

IBM did offer him a chance to be part of a program targeting campus leaders for management-track jobs in manufacturing. But he waited several months more for a management job at Pacific Bell that would enable him to use his people skills as well as his engineering credentials.

Sylvester is a master networker who has already written to all of baseball’s general managers, hearing back from 90% of them and even talking personally to one--the Giants’ Al Rosen. And he haunts the halls of baseball’s winter meetings, making contacts and asking questions.

“People always complain that it’s who you know,” he says, “but you have to put yourself in a position to meet who you know.”

Aside from James, I haven’t heard too many of you talk about public service.

Walter Sylvester: That’s something I definitely want to do. Once I get my job going , I want to tutor in high schools or help out in food drives. You’ve got to do something to help out the community, be a role model.

Ben Wexler: I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, actually. One thing I think is that you have to be OK with yourself before you can do a lot for anyone else. I think there are degrees of what you can do. For example, it’s been a little dream of mine to put my sister through college so my parents could have the freedom to do what they want.

Sherrick Murdoff: The first people I want to pay back are my parents. They’ve done so much for me. Maybe I’ll send them to Europe or let them retire early, buy them a home somewhere, whatever I can do.

Is there anything you can foresee that would politicize this generation?

Wexler: I think it tells you a lot about our generation that we always need symbols to get us worked up. People did get worked up about the Gulf War--for about two days. The funny thing about both sides of that demonstration was that so few people seemed to have anything worthwhile to say. On one side , you had a lot of people trying to look like hippies. On the other side , you had the pro-war people, all of them carrying the flag.

Murdoff: It was like, “We’re the side that burns the flag.” And, “We’re the side that waves the flag.”

Wexler: Burn it! Wave it ! Burn it! Wave it!

AS A COLUMNIST IN THE Daily Bruin, Ben Wexler is one of UCLA’s most visible commentators--on campus issues, the vagaries of life, and himself. As graduation approached, more and more of his musings focused on life after college--or the lack thereof. “When people ask me whether I plan to have a life, I get extremely defensive. I want to give an answer, or at least seem like I have an answer, but instead I begin to think of the person as someone who wants my ATM code.”

Wexler stopped job hunting before he ever really started. In part that’s because he wants to become a Hollywood writer and director--and the career center doesn’t exactly run postings reading: “Wanted, scriptwriter for major sitcom, $70,000/yr, no exp. needed.” At the urging of an agent, who called after Wexler published a popular humor tabloid on campus last quarter, he plans to rework a “Naked Gun”-type screenplay he once wrote and to write spec scripts for a couple of ongoing TV series. He also hopes to roll out more issues of his humor magazine.

His aspiration to write and direct is probably the strongest commitment to one direction Wexler has ever made. An actor at Evanston Township High School in Illinois (which churned out such successes as Joan Cusack and her brother John), he originally toyed with becoming a theater major. He applied to UCLA’s competitive film school but didn’t get in. Finally, he opted for a communications major because, he says, “it was the most noncommittal thing I could possibly do at the last moment. One of my biggest problems is that I like the idea of keeping options open and experiencing a lot of things, so I haven’t gotten really good at one thing.”

That may be because Wexler has seen that commitment--particularly to an office job--has not made his parents especially happy. “Somewhere along the line I think I said, ‘I don’t know if I can handle doing that,’ ” he says. “I don’t expect to direct films for another 20 years. There’s a lot I will have to do to get to that point. But I want to have as much creative freedom as possible in my life.”

What do you feel when you read about the problems in our society--drugs, crime, the environment, homelessness?

Teresa Garcia: Sometimes I feel like I’m just nobody, I can’t do anything about it, especially in L . A ., with the gang members and drugs.

Alanna Klein: I feel that you have to start with politics when you’re dealing with something like this. The older generation keep s voting for things that are for them and not thinking about future generations. Something has to be done about getting people voting, getting people into politics, getting them aware that we have to get involved. It’s just as much our fault for not voting and fighting this older generation. It’s the responsibility of people our age to become active.

We’re getting robbed.