Students Graduate to a New Career Quandary : Despite an increase in job opportunities, many scoff at the notion of accepting positions that offer low pay and little prestige.

Wearing a crisp blue suit and carrying 20 fresh resumes, Dima Kurland, a 23-year-old senior at Cal State Northridge, walked through the doors of the school’s student union into what looked like a bustling arena of opportunity.

Seventy employers clamored for students’ attention, all offering something that has been in short supply at local college campuses in recent years: jobs. But as Kurland, an accounting major with solid grades and an ebullient personality, wandered past the rows of brightly colored booths, his heart sank.

Instead of the Big Six accounting firms he hoped to encounter at the job fair earlier this month, he was greeted by six temporary employment agencies.

IBM, Xerox and other corporate heavyweights that were regulars at CSUN job fairs in the late 1980s had been replaced by Blockbuster Video, Office Depot and dozens of anonymous companies looking for salespeople and management trainees.

Though Kurland faces graduation at the end of the month without a single job offer, he passed out just five resumes before leaving in disgust.

“It was like, what a waste of time that I even got dressed for this,” Kurland said. “I saw the Blockbusters and those types of companies, but I just can’t see myself working there after five years of college.”

Trouble is, he may have little choice. For Kurland and other college seniors, the working world offers good news and bad news this year. Employment opportunities are up as much as 6% from last year, marking the biggest rebound since the market for college graduates shrank 30% between 1988 and 1992, according to a widely followed Michigan State University employment survey.

But the quality of jobs available has many students shaking their heads. Years of corporate downsizing have wiped out the middle-management career paths that previous classes of college graduates followed. In their place are service, sales and retail management slots that many students consider unappealing--career compromises they are forced to make simply because they came up losers in a generational lottery.

At CSUN, the number of companies coming on campus to interview students has plummeted from 326 in the 1989-90 academic year to 105 this year. And the number of interviews conducted on the campus has dropped from 4,565 to 1,152. Officials said employers are starting to come back, but that this year’s figures were down slightly from a year ago largely because of a sharp decline in enrollment at CSUN, a campus that was badly damaged in last year’s earthquake.

Demand for graduates has picked up in a number of fields, including health care, chemical and electrical engineering as well as computer science, said Ann Morey, a supervisor at the CSUN Career Center. “But the realistic thing is it’s mostly sales and mostly retail,” she said.

If students are lukewarm to these prospects, some scorned employers apparently aren’t thrilled either. Morey said the career center gets several calls per month from employers--usually in the retail and service sectors--who gripe that the graduates they hire aren’t energetic or dedicated. Such calls trickled in just a few times a year during the 1980s, she said.

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“We’re seeing more employers talk about a lack of commitment from employees,” Morey said. “Students will make interviews and won’t show up, or they’ll start a job one day and walk off the job the next. Most of our students are doing very well, but they are very selective about what they want to do.”

Laurel Stokes, regional employment manager for Bullock’s Department Stores, expects to hire about 40 graduates this spring, double the number hired through the early 1990s. These new employees will make upward of $25,000 a year as management trainees, Stokes said, and will have the opportunity to climb within several years to positions that pay up to $40,000 per year.

Opportunities like that are nothing to scoff at, Stokes said, but many of today’s students do. Students routinely skip scheduled interviews during campus recruiting visits, a breach of etiquette that almost never happened in the 1980s, she said. And the students she does hire these days “are 9-to-5’ers,” Stokes said. “They want to spend their time on the beach or hanging out at the local brewery. I truly think it’s a generational thing.”

Her comments were mirrored in an annual survey of employers conducted by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State. In this year’s survey, complaints about graduates included “mediocre academic performance, lack of flexibility, not hard-working, unrealistic expectations and miscalculated job market values. An attitude of superiority was noted too.”

Many of today’s students have heard these complaints before. Dubbed Generation X, today’s twentysomethings have been widely portrayed as flannel-wearing slackers, and numerous studies show they are the first generation in decades to believe their standard of living will fail to reach that of their parents.

Patrick Scheetz, director of the Employment Research Institute, said some of the complaining about today’s graduates is simply the latest version of the timeless lament, “What’s the matter with kids today?” But much of it reflects a real shift in the values and priorities of today’s graduates, he said, a shift that came about in response to the economic carnage these students witnessed during their college years.

Many of today’s students are faced with jobs that offer less pay and prestige than those their older brothers and sisters landed in the 1980s, Scheetz said. Further, today’s graduates entered college just as the economy nose-dived. They have been bombarded with news reports of layoffs in aerospace and other industries, watched companies such as IBM retreat from promises of lifetime employment for their workers and witnessed the unsettling rise in contract and temporary employment.

All of this leaves students to wonder about employers, “Do you want me or don’t you?” Scheetz said. “How are they supposed to perform 110% but also be aware they might not be around. This generation faces a lot of uncertainty. They are trying to judge the lay of the land so they can respond to it.”

Katina Jackson, a design and marketing major at tiny Woodbury University in Burbank, has peered across the career landscape and sees a minefield. Like many her age, she is charting a course of self-reliance.

“I don’t see people my age getting with a company and staying there forever,” said Jackson, 21, who has a 2.9 grade-point average. “We’re going to learn as much as we can from companies and then move on. My end job is going to be running my own business. To me that’s job security, because it’s yours.”

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In the meantime, she continues looking for a job in apparel design or marketing. On Sunday, she pores over the job listings in Apparel News, Advertising Age and four other trade publications to which she subscribes. She also checks the listings in the university’s career center. On Monday, she makes calls and faxes resumes from her computer. Then she waits and hopes.

So far, Jackson has had 10 interviews, but no offers. With few prospects and graduation fast approaching, Jackson recently had an uncomfortable but unavoidable conversation with her mother, who lives in Pasadena. “I told her, ‘I’m still looking, I haven’t given up, but if I have to move home, is there room for me?’ ” Jackson said. Her mother was thrilled, Jackson was not.

Having worked at The Limited and Bullock’s to help pay her college bills, Jackson sees retail as a last resort. “I did that at age 17,” she said, “and I don’t want to do that again.”

But such standards are difficult to maintain when alternatives are scarce, and many of today’s graduates do settle into jobs in the service sector, no matter their degree. Bill Rivers, chairman of the mechanical engineering department at CSUN, knows this as well as anybody.

For decades the department “was directed almost exclusively toward the aerospace industry,” Rivers said. Legions of graduates marched across the proscenium at graduation and into high-paying jobs at Rockwell, Hughes, Lockheed and other Southern California aerospace giants.

But thousands of those jobs evaporated with the contraction of the defense industry that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hoping to learn about the fate of recent graduates, Rivers conducted an informal survey this year of 50 engineering students who graduated in 1994.

The top students had indeed landed lucrative research jobs, including a few in aerospace, but more than a third were in jobs that didn’t require their engineering degrees. One student sold financial investments, another worked at a grocery store and another at a record store. “The A and B students don’t have any trouble,” Rivers said. “The ordinary students are the ones who get hurt.”

Count Bryan Ching, 24, is among the wounded. Since graduating with a 3.0 grade-point average in mechanical engineering last June, Ching has sent out dozens of resumes and interviewed with a handful of large aerospace companies. But no offers have come in yet, so he works as a supervisor at Price Club in Northridge.

Ching acknowledged that he often gets discouraged, that he sometimes goes weeks without pursuing any job leads and that his position at Price Club has grown tiresome. “What I’m doing now is OK work,” he said. “But you don’t need a degree to do this. I come in and do my job and get out of here. There’s no challenge.”

Ching’s predicament is increasingly common. About one in four college graduates who enter the labor force between 1992 and 2005 will fail to land jobs that make use of their degrees, up from 1 in 5 through the late 1980s, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Even prestigious employers say today’s graduates have different priorities than their gung-ho counterparts of the 1980s. Arthur Andersen , one of the so-called Big Six accounting companies, will hire about 140 graduates across Southern California this year, down from 180 a year in the late ‘80s, said Dana Ellis, director of Southern California recruiting for the company.

That means Arthur Andersen can be a little more picky filling $30,000-a-year slots on the company’s accounting staff. But today’s graduates look out for themselves, Ellis said, and frequently come to interviews with demands of their own.

Applicants ask, “When I come here, what are your expectations of me?” Ellis said. “The environment back in the ‘80s was pay your dues for 10 years, working your tail off to make partner. Now people are saying they want a better balance, so banging their heads on the desk for 12 hours a day, six days a week is not acceptable.”

With less than two weeks to go before graduation, Dima Kurland knows a call from Arthur Andersen or any other accounting firm is unlikely. His record is solid. He has a 3.0 grade-point average, has taken graduate-level accounting courses, and for several years has worked with a campus organization that helps low-income people prepare their tax returns. But his job search, which began last September, continues.

“If I would have graduated four or five years ago, I’d be in great shape right now,” Kurland said. “It’s discouraging, but there’s nobody to blame. That’s the way times are.”