CAMPUS & CAREER GUIDE : Job Market Blues : Economy Forces Students to Switch Career Plans or Lower Goals

During the mid- to late 1980s, talented accounting undergraduates at Cal State Northridge and elsewhere had only to pick their perks--fancy dinners, sports tickets and even cruises--from big accounting firms eagerly looking to hire them.

But it has been a long time since Cal State Northridge Career Center director Leland C. Gassert has seen any employers waving goodies in students’ faces. Even before the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake struck, shutting down much of the campus for weeks, the number of employers bearing jobs for hopeful college graduates had been in sharp decline at the school, as well as at other colleges throughout Southern California.

Although community colleges and universities keep churning out graduates, job-seekers are finding some of the toughest job-hunting in years.

With Southern California’s recession dragging into its fifth year, the recent temblor has further dampened hopes that the region’s economic troubles will soon begin to lift. Consequently, many students are having to downsize or switch career plans, and schools are trying to offer students more help in finding jobs.

Nationally, the employment picture for new college graduates is looking better for the first time in several years, with surveys predicting about a 2% increase in hiring this year. But experts predict that the Southern California market will remain depressed.

“When we weren’t in a recession, all of these were filled,” Gassert said recently, pointing to display cases outside Northridge’s Career Center that held just a smattering of job listings. Gassert said 1993 was the worst job market he has seen in his 22 years at the school, and 1994 is not looking any better.

Gassert said the number of employers recruiting on campus during 1992-93 was down 34% from two years earlier, the number of students interviewed was down 41% and solid full-time job listings were down 16%. The numbers dropped again last fall.

Career counselors on other Southern California campuses have had similar experiences.

Thomas A. Parham, director of the Career Planning and Placement Center at UC Irvine, said the numbers of employers coming to on-campus recruitment sessions dropped about 20% in the last two years, and those who continued to participate interviewed fewer students. Further, the widely reported troubles in the economy have discouraged students from trying for a job, so fewer students were signing up for appointments, he added.

“We’re seeing some of our students deciding to apply to graduate school to ride out the recession,” Parham said.

The poor economy also is spurring students and college officials to rethink their approaches to the job market. Student interest in fields such as business administration and accounting, once considered a sure thing, is on the decline. Students now are more willing to move out of the area in search of jobs.

The recession is forcing many graduates to take lower-paying or less prestigious positions than five years ago. And internships and other work credits are increasingly important, as today’s graduates often must compete with more experienced workers who have suffered layoffs.

Steve McLean, 30, a graduate student in journalism at USC, had his heart set on a career in entertainment public relations. But he has added internships or part-time jobs in other specialty areas--writing an insurance company newsletter and news releases for a campus publication--to improve his chances of landing a job when he finishes his master’s degree.

“I feel it’s important to broaden myself,” McLean said, “but I also worry that if I spread myself too thin, my networking won’t be too effective. It’s a fine line, and I still don’t know exactly how to travel it.”

Officials at some schools are adopting such measures as requiring all students to take an orientation class that would include career and job search issues, and devoting more faculty time to developing internships.

For now, counselors said, some of the bright spots locally for new graduates include health occupations such as nursing and physical therapy, environmental and workplace safety fields and teaching, especially for bilingual and special education instructors.

Job prospects for business administration, accounting and especially engineering majors--the latter most related to post-Cold War declines in the defense industry--have suffered the biggest drops since the high-flying years during the 1980s, campus counselors said.

Gassert said the recruiting war over accounting majors in the mid-1980s became so heated at one point that prominent accounting firms called a summit meeting at USC with officials from area universities to try to stem the tide of perks.

Researchers at UCLA who survey college freshmen annually to spot trends say that nationwide, the number planning business careers dropped by nearly half to 14.3% in 1992 from a peak of 24.6% in 1987. Interest in engineering and accounting careers dropped less dramatically.

But interest in health careers climbed from 12% of freshmen in 1988 to 19.6% in 1992, led by new career choice highs in nursing (5.7%) and medicine/dentistry (5.9%). Related health fields also rose sharply from 5.3% in 1988 to 8% by 1992.

Generally, college counselors urge students to make their career choices based on the fields that appeal to them, not on the job demands of the marketplace, saying those are likely to change constantly. And they urge students to get a broad education that will give them job flexibility.

UC Irvine’s Parham said he has seen “a real upswing” in interest in people with liberal arts degrees, a trend he applauds because of the broad, solid grounding it provides. He said he believes the best combination is a liberal arts degree with some technical training.

He also counsels students to be patient, allowing six to nine months for a job search that a few years ago would have taken two to three months to come to fruition.

“I tell students to look at an unemployment figure of nearly 10% and remind themselves that means more than 90% of people do have jobs,” Parham said.

McLean, the USC graduate student, has tempered his outlook with practicality, however. “I am optimistic. I think I have the skills and ability to succeed,” he said.

Times education writer Jean Merl contributed to this story.