Grads Want More, Get Less : Downsizing Has Erased Middle-Management Career Paths

Outside, the band played as UC Irvine students laughed, joked and ate lunch. Inside the school’s career center, though, the atmosphere was restrained, even disheartening, as students scanned the hundreds of job listings posted on the walls.

Tony Marquez and Meredith Nordstrom were stoic about the certitude that they would not find any job even close to the careers in education that they long for. In fact, they had given up looking for teaching jobs and were reviewing the business listings.

“You put an application in and you just get a form letter back,” said Marquez, a 22-year-old Spanish major at UCI. “I would like to use my Spanish skills teaching, but I’m willing to work in business. I want to live comfortably.”

Nordstrom just received her master’s degree in history last month from Cal State Fullerton, but she already has decided that landing a teaching job is unrealistic.

“I’m just looking for anything,” said Nordstrom, 25, whose bachelor’s degree is in history from UCI.

A degree is essential, but flexibility is what college graduates also need these days to sort out a growing job dilemma.

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 consider unappealing career compromises.

“The boom years of a number of college recruiters coming to campus has declined in recent years,” said Thomas Parham, director of UCI’s Career and Life Planning Center. “Part of it is function of the high-tech companies’ layoffs, particularly in Southern California.”

Parham encourages students to equate the situation as “the glass is half-full instead of half-empty.” Instead of seeing that unemployment is at 8% nationally, students should realize that 92% are employed, he said, and should be open to areas outside their studies and in other parts of the country.

“Only 20% of students end up working in jobs directly related to their major,” Parham said. “We teach beyond the mind-set that the first job will be for the rest of their career. They need to look for opportunities to develop skills, knowledge and experience that will give them the professional growth five to seven years down the line.”

To get a good jump in the competition for career-type jobs, students must start making contacts with possible employers up to nine months before graduation, not a month or two before “Pomp and Circumstance.”

“For the student who is looking for a job description or for long-term work, the new trend is pretty scary,” said Bobbe Browning, director of career development and counseling at Cal State Fullerton.

Companies are often hiring on a project-only basis, lasting anywhere from three months to three years. Benefits are not included and there is no security. But, she said, the upside is that one can develop a niche and a reputation, often leading to a full offer.

Browning said that 95% of Fullerton graduates stay in California, with 87% remaining in Orange and Los Angeles counties. But those looking to stay in Orange County are fighting an uphill battle, she said. With the county’s bankruptcy and the ever-present threat of corporate relocation, openings for local jobs are scarce and highly prized.

Both Browning and Parham maintain that the service and retail industries can serve as excellent alternatives because the first job provides invaluable experience in management, budgeting and recruiting.

A few national companies have found Orange County a hotbed for well-educated and savvy graduates. Donna Miller, Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s regional human resources manager, said the students in the county tend to be more “stable” than those in Los Angeles.

“We prefer a business degree, but as long as they are outgoing, career-focused and have leadership skills, they are candidates to work in a professional environment,” Miller said.

Bullock’s Department Stores expects to hire about 40 graduates this spring, double the number hired through the early 1990s, said Laurel Stokes, Bullock’s regional employment manager. The new employees will make up to $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.

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-5ers,” 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. 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.

Still, some collegians are maximizing their odds. Even in the once-secure engineering job market, students aren’t taking chances. Jason Kwak, a 22-year-old UC Berkeley senior from Cerritos, has expanded his studies beyond the narrow specialty of civil engineering.

“I’m doing general engineering courses so I increase my chances,” Kwak said. “I have a lot of friends that say it’s pretty rough out there, and I think the broader knowledge will help me later.”

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.”

Even prestigious employers say today’s graduates have different priorities than their gung-ho counterparts of the 1980s. Arthur Andersen & Co., 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.”

Frustration still is prolific, even among the students who did everything right. Lisa, a 22-year-old UC Irvine senior who declined to provide her last name, worked two jobs throughout school, including one at Bank of America.

But that work experience hasn’t helped her land a job in any field relating to her major, economics. She feels disillusioned further, she said, when all she sees in the business listings at UCI’s career center are positions for administrative assistant or receptionist.

“I didn’t spend four years in school to be a secretary,” Lisa stammered. “A bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean anything anymore.”