Post-college careers: Rotten luck for the Class of 2009

Things couldn’t be worse for the 2009 graduating class, said Steve Giegerich in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the “numbers are bleak.” Businesses are hiring 22 percent fewer new graduates than last year—and 2008 wasn’t exactly a knockout year. “Not only is the economy not growing, it’s retracting,” said NACE spokesman Edwin Koch. “It’s an abysmal employment market.” Many grads are now settling for unpaid internships in the hope that they’ll be hired full time when the economy does turn around. That doesn’t mean recent graduates shouldn’t expect to ever find the job they want, “only that it will take longer.”

Unfortunately, the bad news for grads doesn’t end when they get a job, said Sara Murray in The Wall Street Journal. Entering the workforce during a recession can have lasting effects on how much you earn over the course of a career, according to one study by Yale School of Management economist Lisa Kahn. “Even those who land jobs will likely suffer lower wages for a decade or more compared with those lucky enough to graduate in better times.” Studying data from the deep recession of the early 1980s, Kahn found that a single percentage-point increase from year to year in the unemployment rate correlated to an 8 percent reduction in earnings for new graduates. Twelve years out of school, graduates from recession years were still earning an average of about 5 percent less than peers who entered the workforce just before or after they did. Even 18 years out of school they averaged 2 percent less. One way to shake this “curse” is to just stay in school a few years longer—not surprisingly, this year’s top graduate schools “are already tracking double-digit increases” in applications.

Not only expected salaries but entire career paths may be “drastically” affected by this retrenchment, said Steve Lohr in The New York Times. While the promise of a six-­figure paycheck on Wall Street once “proved irresistible to many of America’s brightest young people,” today’s go-getters are setting their sights on jobs in public service, science, health, and technology. “Graduate schools of government and public policy are seeing a surge of applications.”­ These aspiring civil servants aren’t just eager to do their part for society by working for the government; they also think that’s where the jobs are. “The timing is right to do this,” says Patricia Foglesong, who recently turned down a consulting job. She’s ­considering two government jobs: one with the Secret Service and one with the National Park Service.

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