For College Graduates, It’s a Seller’s Market in Hunt for Jobs

Just a few months ago, Jason Krantz was reading Nietzsche, puzzling over Heidegger and putting the finishing touches on his senior thesis about Flaubert. He was preparing to graduate from St. John’s College, a liberal arts bastion where there are no tests, no majors and not a whiff of careerism--just a mountain retreat near Santa Fe, N.M., where every student reads the same Great Books.

A few years ago, that kind of ivory tower education could well have been a one-way ticket to the unemployment line. But not for Krantz in today’s go-go economy. Two full months before he graduated, he was offered a position as an inventor with Walker Digital, a high-tech research and development firm in Connecticut, for more than $30,000 a year and a fat signing bonus on the side.

As America’s economic boom generates jobs faster than educated workers come along to fill them, even college graduates with degrees in psychology, philosophy and other liberal arts are being snapped up.

“When I came here nine years ago, I’d go to alumni meetings and all they talked about was ‘I don’t have a job,’ ” said John Agresto, president of St. John’s College. “I stopped hearing that.”

“I’ve been in this business for 21 years,” said Kathy Sims, director of the UCLA career center. “This is, across the board, the healthiest marketplace for the new college graduates I’ve ever witnessed.”

When college students hit the streets this summer, the unemployment rate was 4.5%, the lowest in 28 years. So great is the demand for computer scientists and other skilled workers that high-tech companies have been lobbying Congress to allow more foreigners into the country.

The result has been a seller’s market for college graduates--and not just for those with degrees in engineering and other technical fields.

According to a survey by the National Assn. of Colleges and Employers, the average starting salary for 1998 graduates in English, classics and related majors was $27,608--up almost 16% from the previous year.

“Because the booming economy is driving up the need for the educated work force, really everyone is doing well,” said Camille Luckenbaugh, employment information director for the association.

To be sure, there are still plenty of jobless anthropologists and classics majors wondering how they will pay the rent. It is still a tough time to take a liberal arts degree into academics or other nonprofit enterprises. But for those who look further afield--into such sectors as business, the service industries and consulting--liberal arts graduates are finding new opportunities in the expanding economy.

For one thing, the shortage of graduates trained in engineering and other technical fields has forced some employers to cast a broader net for their employees.

“Engineering and computer science graduates are going like hot potatoes, getting $60,000 a year in Silicon Valley,” said Gina Goings, a recruiter for Walker Digital. “We can’t compete. Our preference is for engineering and computer science majors, but we are open to all majors.”

And with many fields in constant flux, some employers are concluding that no matter what their employees’ course of study, they will need significant on-the-job training to keep pace with change.

“Almost everyone I’ve graduated with is being trained, either formally or informally, for something completely different from what they did in college,” said Noah Kroll, a trainee with Merrill Lynch & Co. who graduated from Lehigh University last spring with a degree in government.

Increased demand for liberal arts graduates may not outlive the current period of labor shortage. But it may be a more enduring trend if employers see new value in how generalists are able to cope in a rapidly changing economy. If so, it would represent a big departure from the trend toward increased specialization that has dominated the vocational and professional scene for decades.

“It may take a while for that mind-set to change that a generalist is not going to have a problem getting a job,” said Margaret Odell, placement director at St. John’s College. “It’s always going to be a hard sell to parents, because most of them grew up in a climate where they needed to specialize.”

This year’s strong job market for college graduates is a continuation of a trend that campus officials began seeing a couple of years ago. At Lehigh in 1995, for example, about 16% of the senior class was still looking for a job or professional school placement at graduation, according to Donna Goldfeder, director of career services.

That percentage dropped in half in 1996, then to 7% in 1997, and Goldfeder thinks the placement record for the class of 1998 will turn out to be even better.

“We had more recruiters and more job postings than ever,” said Goldfeder. “We are seeing almost no students coming back for help this summer.”

Faced with cutthroat demand for college graduates, many employers are stepping up their campus recruitment efforts. Companies that used to visit colleges in January and February are showing up as early as September and October to fill jobs for the following spring.

At Carleton College in Minnesota, twice as many recruiters showed up this year. Some potential employers even came to recruit juniors, said Chris Otis Skinner, director of Carleton’s career center.

However, a bountiful job market does not mean that students can just wait for jobs to come to them. The most successful liberal arts graduates have been those who were aggressive and organized about their job searches--getting internships, summer jobs and other experience that could give them a leg up.

“One of the things we might have predicted a few years ago was that students might become more complacent, passive in their job search,” said Sims of UCLA. “That hasn’t happened. Students are much more participatory. They can get career information 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the Internet.”

This is, after all, a generation of students who entered college at a time when jobs were not so plentiful. So it was with some anxiety that Krantz started studying in 1994 at a college so resolutely anti-careerist.

“I was worried,” Krantz said. “But one of the appeals of the place was that I’d get to try a wide variety of disciplines.”

By the time Krantz was a senior, companies such as Walker Digital were hungry for workers. The company distributed recruitment fliers on campus during his senior year and Krantz responded. The company flew him from New Mexico to Connecticut for two days of interviews. A week later, they offered him a job as an assistant research project manager.

“My goal had been to get a job by graduation, and I ended up getting one several months before,” Krantz said. “I lucked out.”

Across the country at Lehigh, senior Megan Fitzpatrick was taking nothing for granted as she prepared for graduation this spring. She tried to make herself more marketable by focusing her mathematics major on statistics and taking a series of exams to qualify as an actuary. Her efforts were rewarded when she got five job offers by the end of January.

Three of the five companies offered signing bonuses. In the end she accepted a job with Towers Perrin, a consulting firm, which topped other companies by offering a $42,900 annual salary, plus a $5,000 bonus.

Some liberal arts students have maneuvered themselves into the hottest job market by developing their computer skills on the side. That’s how another St. John’s graduate, Paul Blouin, went from studying Dante’s “Inferno” to accepting a $32,000-a-year job overseeing the computer systems of a truck brake manufacturer. Without taking any computer science courses, Blouin was skilled enough to get two solid job offers before he graduated.

“As a freshman, I was kind of worried that I was getting into a weird education that is renowned for ending up flipping burgers,” said Blouin. “I can see now very easily what my education did for me. It taught me project planning, problem solving. Give me something I’ve never seen before. I’ll figure it out.”