The Job Outlook: Awful

Barbara Butler graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in humanities last December. She wanted to go to graduate school, but she had already borrowed money to finance her way through college and had to get a job so that she could begin paying her debt. The only employment she could find was as a clerk in a St. Paul dress shop. Last week, depressed by her work and unable to land a better job, she quit, gave up her apartment and moved in with relatives. "I'm not sure what I'm going to do," she says. "Sometimes I find myself virtually paralyzed."

Barbara's discouraging experience will be more the rule than the exception this month as some 700,000 college graduates begin their search for employment. The job situation is bad and seems to be getting worse. Last week the College Placement Council reported that there are 18% fewer jobs available for college graduates this year than there were a year ago. Job openings for engineering graduates with bachelor's degrees are down 20%; openings in the auto, building and mechanical equipment industries have plummeted 60%. Says Victor Lindquist, director of the placement office at Northwestern University: "This job market is the most difficult one that we've had in almost 20 years."

Many companies did not even bother to hold traditional interviews on campus this year. Last year 91 companies recruited at the University of Washington; this year 46 showed up. At the University of Wisconsin, 31 of the 107 companies that scheduled interviews later canceled their appointments. The recruiters who did come were besieged. Harvard students stood in line for half an hour just to sign up for interviews with the Mellon Bank and the Morgan Guaranty Trust. "The only time I've seen more people in this building is when they're demonstrating," said Robert Ginn, Harvard's associate director of career planning.

At other schools, students have flocked to special job-hunting courses. Stanford, for example, is offering seniors special courses in Survival Tactics in the Job Market, How to Blow an Interview, and Opportunities in Biology. Frank Heuston, a career counselor at Northeastern, is teaching a special eight-hour seminar in how to land a job. Heuston acknowledges that his techniques "sometimes verge on the unethical" (for instance, he tells seniors to hang around executive bars, where they might meet prospective employers), but he says they work.

Seniors who do land jobs, by whatever means, are receiving higher salaries than last year. Starting salaries for University of Utah graduates range from $12,500 to $19,000 for engineering students, from $8,400 to $12,000 for accounting graduates, and from $15,900 to $17,500 for M.B.A.s. The talk of the campus is a black Ph.D. chemical engineer who accepted a $20,400 offer from Eastman Kodak.

At most schools, the job search is easiest for minority and women students. Sears, Roebuck, for example, interviewed only minority students in one trip to the University of Washington. "If I had 100 black engineers, male or female but preferably female, I know I could place them with five phone calls," says Northwestern's Lindquist.

Many seniors postpone the job search by applying to graduate school. Explains John Buckley, placement director at New York University: "They go to graduate school because they don't have a $12,000-a-year job and they hope the economy will turn." Some students suffer deeply, however, when they are turned down for graduate work. "A state of panic seems to hit them," says Anthena Constantine, placement director at Columbia. Indeed, the odds for graduate-school admission can be frightening. Columbia, for example, had 5,000 applications for 300 places in its law school, 5,000 applications for 147 seats in medical school, and 2,250 applications for 52 openings in dental school.

For current undergraduates, the job hunt after college will only get harder. Richard Freeman, an associate professor of economics at Harvard, believes that seniors will face a long delay before they find the jobs they want. Says he: "An awful lot of people are going to end up in nonmanagerial, nonprofessional jobs, and the situation is not going to get any better until the 1980s." College enrollments, already dropping as a result of the end of the baby boom, may well begin to fall even faster as students become aware that a college degree is no longer an automatic passport to a good job.

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