Even Elite Graduates Face Bleak Job Picture in Mexico : Economy: Monterrey school’s degree used to be ticket to solid future. But peso’s collapse has changed that.

Alejandra Zambala spent the past five years at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, the educational bastion of the free-market thought that swept Mexico in the early 1990s, preparing for her place in a bright future of international trade and private enterprise.

Within days of her graduation in December, the peso was devalued, igniting an economic collapse that makes that future look far away indeed.

Now Zambala is trying to make ends meet on a monthly salary of 2,000 pesos (about $320)--the same amount as her pocket money when she was a student. Except that then, before the devaluation, her allowance was worth closer to $600.

Zambala’s parents still help out, but they have their own troubles: The devaluation has practically doubled the dollar debt they owe suppliers of their Tijuana bakery chain.

And Zambala counts herself lucky. At least she has a job at the campus multimedia center; most of her 1,659 former classmates are unemployed. Government figures released Wednesday show that unemployment is higher, especially here in Mexico’s north, than it has been since 1987.

“The percentage of people in my graduating class who are working is very low,” says the 22-year-old, shaking her dark bob. “We are in a very critical moment.”

For Zambala’s class and the Class of 1995, the economic crisis has made graduation from this elite university less an achievement than a moment of reckoning. It will probably mark their lives and careers in the same way the Great Depression or the Vietnam War left its stamp on a generation of Americans.

These students’ hopes were nurtured as the North American Free Trade Agreement was negotiated and their country joined a bevy of impressive international trade organizations. They were going to transform family businesses into global enterprises or be snatched up by corporations eagerly expanding into international markets.

Nowhere did such hopes soar higher than here at “El Tec,” which is among Mexico’s largest, most prestigious--and most expensive--private universities. Under former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a degree from El Tec was virtually a passport to a well-paid job with a solid future. But those dreams have been dashed for the classes of ’94 and ’95.

Mexican undergraduate degrees take five years to complete, so this year’s graduates started college shortly after Salinas began his six-year term with promises that the changes he was about to make would put Mexico “in the vanguard of the worldwide transformation.”

“We practically entered with Salinas,” Zambala says. “It was all moments of triumph. My parents’ income kept rising. We all thought when we graduated we would only have to say: ‘Here I am. Take advantage of me.’ ”

Top-notch students come from all over Mexico to study at this shaded campus of modernistic buildings. The Monterrey Institute of Technology was founded half a century ago by northern industrialists distressed at the increasingly socialist bent of Mexican public education. They built a university modeled after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and science, engineering and professional administrative skills are emphasized over the theoretical and ideological courses that still predominate in many of Mexico’s public universities.

Students here are taught that their success will depend on their ability to do their jobs rather than on the family and friendship ties that traditionally determine success and status in Mexico.

El Tec is a ticket to upward mobility based on merit. It contrasts sharply with both the virtually free public universities, where mass education often leaves students ill-prepared for the job market, and the incestuously tiny Mexico City private schools where diversity means contemporaries from various country clubs.

Tec alumni--such as Federico Sada, the CEO of Mexico’s largest company, Vitro Corp., and Ernesto Martens, chosen to rescue the troubled Aeromexico airline--run the day-to-day operations of major Mexican corporations. Others are the force behind small businesses that are the backbone of Mexican industry.

The philosophy of El Tec meshed perfectly with the free-market reforms that pulled Mexico from a protected economy of high-import tariffs and stiff investment restrictions into global competition for both goods and capital.

“Just a semester ago, all we heard was how Mexico was advancing,” says Veronica Ramos, a 21-year-old industrial engineering student who will graduate in December. “I was optimistic about finding a good job. Sending me here has been a sacrifice for my family because, in Mexico, this is the best.”

Today, the family businesses these students planned to modernize are struggling to survive in an economy in which interest rates have soared above 100%, shelving any hopes of buying new equipment. Corporations are slashing their payrolls drastically. Instead of generating the 1 million new jobs needed to employ the young people entering the work force this year, Mexico’s economy will shrink by half a million jobs.

“Entering the job market in this sort of situation is frustrating,” says Gabriel Perez, who will graduate in May. Perez, a native of the Gulf of California beach town of Guaymas in the state of Sonora, is especially frustrated because, at 26, he could have graduated during the boom if he had not changed majors from engineering to communications.

“Three years ago, it was something else,” he says wistfully. “Now, I do not expect to find a traditional job with a desk and a secretary. But there is free-lance work. If I free-lance full time, I can survive. That is not what I had planned, but that is where I see the opportunities.”

Meanwhile, he is working at the campus radio station to learn and to make the contacts he will need to become a free-lance screenwriter and producer.

Teresa Arrieta, director of the campus placement center, is advising students to follow Perez’s example.

“We are encouraging people to think of consulting,” she says. “This is not the time to just go fill out an application. They need to sell their own competitive advantages.”

By consulting, she means not giving high-ticket advice but offering contract services--an arrangement that is cheaper for employers than hiring in-house employees. Because most Tec students complete corporate internships before graduating, they have the industry contacts they need to get started.

Arrieta does not keep statistics on placements. Her only basis of comparison with better times is the number of companies recruiting on campus. Five corporations visited in January and February. Last year, 48 recruited on campus, with the bulk coming between August and December, because more students graduate in December than in May.

She insists that some companies are hiring but are simply being more selective.

“Instead of recruiting 10 applicants, they hire one,” she says. “Instead of giving general job requirements, they are asking for people who fill specific profiles. They want to know the person is capable of facing work situations.”

On May 6--just before graduation time--she has scheduled a workshop designed to give students the tools they need to face the tighter job market. But many seniors are not waiting until May. They are already pounding the pavement, resumes in hand--and already feeling discouraged.

“I have been applying at banks, but no one is hiring,” says Monica Ramirez, a 22-year-old marketing major who will graduate in May.

Still, she was not surprised. “I have friends who graduated last semester and still do not have jobs,” she says.

And she has a safety net. Her father owns an optical business. “He is laying people off,” Ramirez notes, “but I think he will find a job for his daughter.”

For those without a family business to go to, such as Hector Diaz, a 22-year-old chemical engineering major who will finish in December, graduate school is looking increasingly interesting.

“I plan to study for a master’s degree either at (the University of Wisconsin in) Madison or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” says Diaz, who is from the central mining state of San Luis Potosi.

He hopes to work part time between graduation and the start of graduate classes, he says. But he adds: “It really is not necessary. I will get a fellowship from CONACYT,” the government’s National Council of Science and Technology, which granted 3,128 scholarships last year for study abroad, mainly in the United States.

But CONACYT is bracing for major cutbacks as part of the government’s contribution to the national economic austerity program. The council’s first priority will be to maintain students who are finishing multiyear programs, according to a CONACYT spokeswoman.

“We will just have to see how much they cut back,” Diaz says.

Officials also worry that students they send to graduate school in the United States will not come back.

“There is less money (in Mexico now) to support research projects,” says Dr. Antonio Pena, president of the Academy of Scientific Research in Mexico City. “Obviously, one of the problems is the young people who have left the country and will not return.”

Lack of research funds and other opportunities could undercut years of government efforts to reverse the brain drain provoked by Mexico’s last economic crisis, in 1982. Plunging oil prices and rising international interest rates set off a Third World debt crisis that forced the devaluation of the peso and chased hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexican scientists and professionals to Europe and the United States. A whole new wave of young people could now decide that they also must abandon their country.

Zambala wavers between joining her boyfriend, who is in graduate school in Los Angeles, and sticking it out in Monterrey.

“This is a lot different from living in the dorm,” she says. “There, everything is paid for. Now, I know what it means when the sales tax increases by 50%,” as it did April 1. “I know what it means to buy my own groceries and pay gas and electricity.

“I thought it would be easier,” Zambala adds. “If I thought before that I would be stable in two years, now I know it will take twice that long. By stable, I mean not just living from paycheck to paycheck. Promotions will come harder.”

She takes some comfort in knowing that people who are now her bosses survived a similar crisis when they were starting their careers in 1982. Their hopes rose and plummeted with oil prices. Then, as Mexico’s economy recovered in the 1990s, their careers did too, because companies facing growing international competition needed the skills they could offer.

“They lived through this, and their lives are stable now,” Zambala says. “If there is not another blow, we will be able to work our way back to the same level.”