Slim Pickings for the Class of '76

James Foss, 23, got his bachelor's degree in industrial management from Michigan's Lawrence Institute of Technology last July. He expected to go to work for one of the major automakers, but neither they nor 50 other companies that Foss approached were interested. Then he learned that he could qualify for a typist's job at Michigan Bell Telephone Co. if he could manage 45 words a minute, and today he is studying typing at a community college near Detroit. The $139-a-week job is no sure thing, but Foss is hopeful: "I'm up to 34 words a minute."

Mark Steinberg, 25, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from U.C.L.A. with an M.A. in psychology from Berkeley, subsists on food stamps and lives on unemployment compensation in Venice, Calif. How many responses has he had to the 50 resumes he sent out? "I don't have to guess," he says. "One." He did not get the job.

Howard Felber, 32, is more fortunate.

He is employed--as an office boy for a real estate firm in Lawrence, Kans., picking up trash, gassing up cars, running other errands. Felber used to be a clerk in a liquor store; before that, in 1974, he got a Ph.D. in medieval history from the University of Kansas.

Similar stories can be heard around any campus: the French major who landed an accounting job after a six-month search; the linguistics graduate who drives a cab; the B.A. in marketing who makes $3.50 an hour in a party-favors store; the Ph.D.s who work as stewardesses, fishermen, welders, bank tellers. All bear witness to the death of the deeply ingrained American belief that a college diploma is a semi-automatic passport to a high-paying job and a fulfilling career. As a Wellesley senior puts it, "After college, there is no free lunch."

There especially will be no free lunch for the class of '76, which is graduating when the nation's economy has not fully recovered from its worst slump since the 1930s and many companies are still holding down hiring. According to the College Placement Council, a Bethlehem, Pa., research group, this year's graduates face possibly the worst job outlook ever. Employers are expected to make 5% fewer job offers to recipients of all kinds of degrees than they did even a year ago, when the recession was at its worst. Some other surveys point to a small improvement, but one that leaves the job picture still bleak.

The employment crisis of the well-educated did not begin and will not end with the class of '76. It has only been aggravated, not caused by the recession and its aftermath. The primary cause is a structural problem that almost nobody foresaw a decade ago: the output of the U.S. educational system and the needs of the U.S. economy are badly out of sync.

In a forthcoming book, The Overeducated American, Harvard Economist Richard B. Freeman explains that in the 1950s and 1960s, an ample demand for graduates existed in industry and Government. But then the number of graduates shot up as the post-World War II baby-boom generation began earning degrees. Even if recession had not reduced industry's demand for graduates, there would have been an oversupply. It got worse because, simultaneously, Government-sponsored research slackened, limiting demand for scientists, and the number of schoolchildren to be educated declined with the U.S. birth rate, lessening the need for teachers. As the supply of graduates outstripped demand for them, the starting salaries of humanities and social sciences B.A.s plunged in real terms (that is, discounted for inflation) below 1960 levels, and increasing

numbers of college graduates took jobs not only unconnected with their fields of study but outside the managerial and professional ranks. They became, in a word, underemployed.

By the end of this academic year, about 1.3 million people will receive bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees, nearly double the level often years ago. During the same period, though, the number of professional, technical and managerial jobs in the U.S. has grown by barely more than a third (see chart). Freeman reckons that the mismatch will get worse until the mid-1980s. Then the college-age segment of the population will diminish somewhat, and the proportion of graduates getting good jobs will increase.

Meanwhile, graduates will have to take what they can get. By far the worst off in the class of '76 are those earning bachelor's degrees in the liberal arts.

Unemployment among new humanities B.A.s is running at about a 15% rate--higher than the 14.4% registered by laborers.

Those who do find work--most probably unrelated to their majors--will earn average starting salaries of $825 per month.

That is less than any other graduates will make (accountants, for example, can expect about $1,000 a month). Architecture is a particularly inhospitable field and about 4,000 more new lawyers will graduate this year than the 26,000 legal positions that are expected to be open.

Many education graduates are no better off than Therese Borden, 23, who, despite her accreditation to teach high school, is distributing lunch trays in a Seattle hospital. "It's very depressing," says she, "to find out that you're not qualified after five years of training." Only specialists in such fields as bilingual Spanish-English teaching or musical-instrument instruction in elementary schools have much hope for employment. With the sometime exception of biologists and economists, Ph.D.s are in dire straits. Academic hiring is nearly dormant (one California psychologist claims to have mailed off 800 resumes over five years), and the uncertain R. and D. climate discourages employment of science doctorates.

The National Board on Graduate Education estimated in December that through the end of the 1970s as few as 7,000 Ph.D.s a year, or a fifth of the 35,000 or so produced, will find work closely related to their training. Getting nonrelated jobs is tough too: corporations often regard Ph.D.s as otherworldly. "We need creative thinking," says Mary McMahon, an Equitable Life assistant vice president, "not their specialized knowledge."

Where are the jobs? "Most employers," says Joe Guthridge, assistant placement director at Georgia Tech, "are forced to get personnel who can turn a profit for them right away, so those students who have a specific talent and can bring it to bear instantly are the ones who get hired." Businessmen are above all looking for problem solvers. Pre-eminent among these are the top-drawer business administration graduates. Pennsylvania's Wharton School and U.C.L.A.'s business school placed nearly all their job-seeking students last year and expect to repeat in 1976.

New doctors, as usual, have no worry about finding employment. Demand is also high for engineers, particularly in the petroleum industry, which is offering baccalaureates about $1,400 a month to start. Computer scientists and technicians (but not pure mathematicians) are prized. Other fields with openings: accounting, hotel and restaurant management, agronomy and horticulture, nursing, and pharmaceutical technology and sales, especially in the insurance business.

Industry is eager to employ women and blacks. Companies canvassed by Frank S. Endicott, retired placement director of Northwestern University, intend to hire 45% more graduates from both groups than they did last year. Even in such godforsaken academic fields as history, women--particularly black women--stand a reasonable chance of finding good jobs.

Graduates for whom there is a lesser demand are finding ways to make themselves more employable. Many return to school, to pursue advanced training in their fields or to enter new, more practical ones. For example, Bob Roos, a B.S. in fisheries science from California's Humboldt State University, works as a clerk and is pursuing a B.A. in accounting. To accommodate such students, many colleges have modified their policies to allow baccalaureates to earn second, low-level degrees.

Students are also flocking to community and junior colleges--public and private two-year institutions respectively--which are the nation's fastest-growing schools. Between 1960 and 1974, enrollment at two-year colleges zoomed from 660,000 to 3,257,000. Some community-college students are "retreads" from more exalted degree programs. Others, including older full-time workers and recent high school graduates, find the two-year programs the surest routes to good jobs. Community colleges frequently combine courses with on-the-job experience away from school. At Miami-Dade Community College, the nation's largest two-year college (50,000 students), mortuary-sciences majors put in substantial time at local funeral parlors.

Administrators of some four-year liberal arts colleges are also moving to prepare students better for the world of work. The College of St. Francis in Joliet, Ill., which once specialized in training teachers, has revamped its curriculum to grant degrees in nuclear medical technology and business administration. John Shingleton, placement director at Michigan State and an early critic of "impractical" education, has instituted an "executive in residence" program that brings General Motors managers to live on campus for a week with liberal-arts majors and impart to them a feeling for the "real world." Boston's Northeastern University has long been famous for its "coop" system under which students for five years alternate course work and full-time employment, on the road to a B.A. Career Services Director Frank Heuston boasts that 77% of Northeastern graduates are placed in jobs related to their skills.

Economic realities have increasingly been figuring in educational planning. Thomas Fernandez, vice president of Atlanta's Emory University, says he consults the U.S. Department of Labor before counseling students. Says he: "You can't crystal-ball it. If we graduate 15,000 chemical engineers every four years, we want to be sure that down the road, chemical engineering is where it's at." Every two-year community college in New York State has an advisory panel of industry officials to assist in creating curriculums or practicing academic contraception if a program produces graduates for whom there are no jobs. More and more, undergraduates are being urged to make career choices early, to keep an eye on the marketplace, and, if they must major in the humanities, to minor in a business field or at least learn to take shorthand.

The vocational bent in higher education has obvious pitfalls. "This whole business of trying to pick a major to match a job is just Russian roulette," says Harvard's Freeman. Today's "hot" fields--engineering or accounting, for example--could be glutted in a few years much as aerospace science, the glamour field of the early 1960s, fell fallow by the decade's end. Besides, asks Herbert Salinger, director of career planning at Berkeley: "Should we turn someone off to a field that really interests him" because job prospects are slim?

Many educators agree with James R. Gass, head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's educational-research arm: "Educational action to prepare for work and active life should aim less at training young people to practice a given trade or profession than at equipping them to adapt themselves to a variety of jobs." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical American changes his job seven times during his lifetime, and his career three times. Francis Fisher, director of Harvard's career services office, goes further, arguing that "we must break the assumption that the purpose of education is to prepare for work." He and other educators contend that liberal-arts training, whatever its salability in the job market, is a necessary resource in a civilized society.

But high-minded theories of education are not much use to young people thinking about bread and butter. Inside the colleges, anxious students have often become prematurely professionalized and disturbingly competitive. At New York's Columbia University, for example, one-third of the freshmen have enrolled in pre-med courses. "As Americans, we really prize a degree, but I'm not sure we prize an education," muses Georgetown Dean Royden B. Davis, S.J.

Job seekers caught in the degree-holders' crunch react variously to their condition. Some, at least at first, are indignant. Alicia Kaye, office manager for a Los Angeles employment agency, reports that liberal-arts majors who are told of openings in insurance or secretarial work often retort: "Why should I take a $600-a-month job when I can collect unemployment benefits?" Others rethink their ambitions: Jackie Smith, a Boston College marketing major who is "shocked and amazed" not to find a job in business, has been a professional boxer for six years and is keeping in shape--just in case. There are graduates who grow frustrated and bitter, and there are those who accept what is available with good humor and hope for better times. Paul Creasey, 25, a U.C.L.A. history B.A., had hoped to become a management trainee but instead mans a spray hose for a commercial pesticide company. "It's not exactly what I had in mind," says he, "but any port in a storm."

Then there are people who are downright cheery about underemployment. Robin McElheny, a 1975 magna cum laude Radcliffe graduate who describes her undergraduate education as "worthless," works as a housecleaner in Boston and hopes to become a quiltmaker. "I enjoy cleaning houses," she says, "and I meet a lot of people doing it." For some, such as a Wellesley graduate working as a groom at a prep school's stables, there is even a certain blue-collar chic in low level jobs.

It is arguable that having upper-class youths work as plumbers' assistants contributes in some small way to a healthy lowering of class and economic barriers. Further, young people who have to wait to find work learn patience and open-mindedness. For one thing, the reflexive antipathy many students once felt toward the corporate world has vanished as they learn where the jobs are. Harvard Sociologist David Riesman thinks that underemployed graduates benefit from the enforced delay in making career choices. "Doing a lower-level job is not so bad," says he, "so long as it's well-paying enough to support a young person, and his record collection, in comfortable style."

What is bad, however, is to have a college graduate stuck in a lower-level job too long. Society is ill served by the dissatisfaction he feels as the job that once seemed a temporary expedient begins to look like a career. And there is an insidious ripple effect to the underemployment of the well-educated. When Ph.D.s take jobs away from B.A.s, the B.A.s find positions--in retail sales, for example--that used to go to high school graduates.

For all their difficulties, the college-educated are still better off than non-college youths. Last year the average unemployment rate for Americans under 24 who had at least four years of college was 8.3%, but for people in the same age group with only a high school diploma it was 19.9%. Despite the eagerness of businessmen to hire college-educated blacks, the average unemployment rate among black teen-agers--who are generally less schooled and skilled than white youths--was a horrifying 42.8%.

Sooner or later, the best-educated young Americans find jobs, if only ones for which they are over qualified, and during a lifetime they will still make much more money than youths with less education. In the process, however, the college-educated underemployed aggravate a social problem even more disruptive than their own: the travail of the non-college youths for whom there are no jobs at all.

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