Retooling the Job Market : Cuts in Aerospace and Automotive Industries Have Led to Glut of Engineers

Jacqueline Hynes remembers a time when undergraduate engineering students barely broke a sweat when it came time to find a job.

In the mid-1980s, “engineering students could just sit in their rooms and wait for the phone calls. They would get five or six good offers a year,” said Hynes, assistant to the dean for undergraduate studies at UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering.

“Today, if you get one good offer, you’re lucky.”

As career placement counselors at some universities admit, eight years of severe cutbacks in defense spending, the end of the Cold War and the downsizing of the commercial airline and auto industries have caused an increasing number of engineering graduates to leave school without jobs.

This downturn has some industry experts concerned that the country could lose its technical edge if the smaller numbers of engineering school graduates entering the work force becomes a long-term trend.

“You have to keep replenishing your skills base with new people who have new ideas,” said John McLuckey, president of Rockwell International Corp.’s Defense Electronics organization. “That’s why it’s so important to keep injecting college graduates into the work force. We have to be greatly concerned over what is happening to our engineering students.”

Perhaps nowhere has the impact of defense cuts been greater than in Southern California. More than 150,000 aerospace and related high-tech industry jobs have been lost in Los Angeles County between 1988 and 1992, according to Dan Flaming, president of the Economic Round Table. He projects that 70,000 aerospace jobs will be lost in the county by the end of 1995.

In Orange County, 27,000 defense-related jobs were slashed between 1987 and 1991. And 11,600 to 17,500 defense-related jobs are expected to be lost over the next four years, according to a forecast released in October by two Cal State Fullerton economists.

At Rockwell International in Seal Beach, the hiring of engineers fresh from college has dropped off dramatically.

In the heyday of defense spending, the company regularly hired more than 500 new engineering graduates a year at the bachelor’s level. Hiring peaked during the 1984-85 school year, when Rockwell brought on 886 new graduates. But last year, hirings out of college reached a 20-year low of 116.

Not every engineering field has been affected the same way. The profession includes a wide range of specialists, from civil engineers who design the nation’s infrastructure to petroleum engineers who manage the nation’s energy supply to mechanical and electrical engineers who cater to such industries as automobiles and electronics.

But for aerospace and nuclear engineering, which are geared toward the once-booming defense industry, the job picture is bleak. The future appears brighter for students in programs designed to tap such fields as health care, multimedia technologies and the environment.

Yet even in these darker days, students still find defense work a powerful lure.

“It’s cutting-edge, it’s where all the high-tech stuff is,” said Matt Mar, a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in mechanical engineering. “And back in the good old days of the Cold War, you had virtually unlimited funds to spend on making it.”

Gary Lutwen, 23, graduated in 1991 from UC Davis with a degree in mechanical engineering. He did on- and off-campus interviews and sent out 20 to 30 applications at a time trying to land a job. He finally settled on a job as an estimator for a sheet-metal factory in Orange County, where he makes 60% less than the average entry-level salary for mechanical engineers.

“It was really frustrating,” he said of his job search. “The on-campus interviewers said, ‘We’re coming, we’re interviewing, but we don’t really have anything.’ They were basically practice interviews.”

Those who are lucky enough to find engineering jobs are learning early the pain of layoffs. Benjamin Roosevelt, 24, graduated summa cum laude in 1990 from the University of Michigan with a degree in manufacturing engineering. After graduation, he worked for McDonnell Douglas on C-17 planes. Six months later he was laid off.

Shortly thereafter he joined Rockwell International Corp.’s Defense Electronics division in Anaheim, where he worked part time on submarine navigation systems. Eighteen months later, he got the ax again.

Today Roosevelt spends his nights at USC finishing his master’s degree in manufacturing engineering; he uses his days to search for jobs. He hasn’t found much.

“The actual number of (job) openings has gone down,” said Manuel Perez, a career counselor at UCLA. “While a company may have been hiring in the hundreds in other years, now there are only a dozen openings--or maybe only one or two.”

Firms are also looking for more experience or are hiring on a per-job basis; few of the positions open are entry-level.

More and more, engineers straight out of school are opting for graduate school to avoid the job market, in hopes it will be different when they’re done.

At UCLA, 50% of the 1992 undergraduate engineering class had at least one job offer before graduation, a drop from 70% in 1991, Perez said. And 30% of the class went directly to graduate school, up from 23% the previous year.

To avoid the job market, some engineering students are opting for what they believe is a surer thing: medical school.

At the University of Illinois, premedical adviser Julian Frankenberg said he sees two to three engineering students a week who have decided late in their undergraduate years to go into medicine.

“These students are scared stiff they cannot find placement in engineering,” Frankenberg said.

Part of that fear could come from what students are seeing--or not seeing--on their campuses. The larger companies have cut back on on-campus recruiting, and the smaller companies can’t afford to send recruiters. At USC, engineering firms accounted for only 25 of the 100 companies that came to a career fair in January, a drop-off of nearly 50% from last year, said Steve Cheney-Rice, assistant director of USC’s career development center.

Since the 1960s, engineering hirings have moved in cycles. But experts say today’s situation is vastly different from the last big defense-related engineering downturn of the early 1970s.

“In the ‘70s there was the potential that the industries in trouble--airline and space--were going to recover,” said Donald L. Ledbetter, regional vice chairman of the industry division of the National Society of Professional Engineers. “Today there is a pessimism about the reappearance of jobs. The technology, the whole way of doing business, is changing.”

“This shortage is extremely serious because a whole sector (defense) is basically disappearing, and others, like automotive and small manufacturers, are also in trouble, especially in California,” said Edward Hohmann, dean of Cal Poly Pomona’s College of Engineering.

Perhaps an equally serious problem has been what the publicized industry slowdowns have done to young people’s perception of engineering.

Interest in engineering has been declining nationwide for the last six years, even though the number of college graduates continues to rise, said Clarke Howatt, associate dean for student affairs at USC’s School of Engineering. In 1992, 63,653 students in the United States graduated with an engineering degree, compared to a peak of 78,178 in 1986.

During the Cold War, no problem seemed more daunting than defense. The government made that clear with its wallet.

But as Benjamin Roosevelt will attest, those days are over. For him, the choice seems clearer with each day he comes up empty searching for a job.

“I am definitely thinking of leaving Southern California, maybe going back to Michigan or Atlanta,” he said. “I am opening my eyes; there are other things out there.”