The Graduates’ Paradox : More Jobs, but Low Pay and 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 were clamoring 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 had hoped to encounter at the job fair last month, he was greeted by six temporary employment agencies. IBM, Xerox and other corporate heavyweights that had been regulars at CSUN job fairs in the late 1980s had been replaced by service companies and dozens of anonymous firms looking for salespeople and management trainees.

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.

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 Michigan State University employment survey.

But the quality of jobs available has many students shaking their heads. Years of corporate downsizings 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.

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At CSUN, the number of companies coming on campus to interview students has plummeted from 326 in the 1989-90 academic year to 105 for 1994-95, officials said. The number of interviews conducted on the campus has dropped from 4,565 to 1,152.

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

If students are lukewarm about these prospects, some employers apparently aren’t thrilled themselves. Morey said the career center gets several calls a month from employers--usually in the retail and service sectors--who gripe that the graduates they hire aren’t energetic or dedicated. During the 1980s, she said, there would be only a few such calls for the whole year.

“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, said she expects to hire about 40 graduates this spring, double the number hired through the early 1990s. The new employees will make upward of $25,000 a year as management trainees, Stokes said, and have the opportunity to climb in several years to positions that pay as much as $40,000 a year.

Opportunities like that are nothing to scoff at, Stokes said, but many of today’s students do. They routinely skip scheduled interviews during campus recruiting visits, a breach of etiquette that hardly ever happened in the ‘80s, she said. 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 are mirrored in the most recent annual survey of employers conducted by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State. The complaints about graduates include “mediocre academic performance, lack of flexibility, not hard-working, unrealistic expectations and miscalculated job-market values. An attitude of superiority was noted too.”

Patrick Scheetz, director of the 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.

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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 ‘80s, Scheetz said. Further, today’s graduates entered college just as the economy nose-dived. They have been bombarded with reports of layoffs in aerospace and other industries, watched firms such as IBM retreat from promises of lifetime employment for their workers and witnessed the unsettling rise in temporary and contract employment.

Katina Jackson, a design and marketing major at 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.”

So far, Jackson has had 10 interviews but no offers.

When the alternatives are scarce, many of today’s graduates do settle into jobs in the service sector, no matter what their academic 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 into high-paying jobs at Rockwell, Hughes, Lockheed and other Southern California aerospace giants.

But tens of 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.

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The top students did indeed land lucrative research jobs, including a few in aerospace, but more than a third were doing work that did not require their engineering degrees. One student sold financial investments, another worked at a grocery store and a third 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, 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 small number of large aerospace companies. But no offers have come in yet, so he works as a supervisor at Price Club in Northridge.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, about one in four college graduates entering the labor force between 1992 and 2005 will fail to land a job that makes use of his or her degree, up from one in five through the late ‘80s.

As for the prestigious employers, even those say today’s graduates have different priorities from those of their gung-ho counterparts of the ‘80s. Arthur Andersen, one of the top accounting firms, will hire about 140 Southern California graduates this year, down from 180 a year late in the last decade, said Dana Ellis, director of Southern California recruiting for the company.

That means the firm 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, frequently coming 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.”