<p>“Moreover…that’s part of the school’s sales pitch. I don’t know about you…but I tend to be skeptical of any positive information coming out of a marketer/salesperson’s mouth unless I can verify it with more neutral third-party sources.”</p>
<p>I am always skeptical. But unless they are paying off the college ranking agencies…it still looks pretty good. Lehigh #12 out of 1248 colleges ranked for best ROI (cost vs lifetime earnings), and Bucknell #44. Does seem like you get your money’s worth.</p>
<p>And poetgrl, it is a tough call. I haven’t been informed of the decision. And for a kid who is actually unsure of the major, do you go for a school with a powerhouse business major, or a school more nationally known with a smaller group of kids in the major? Though monetarily Lehigh looks better, and it’s a great school, Bucknell is a little slice of heaven where I know he’d be really happy. But seeing as I have him married off to your daughter (who will be incredibly successful in her own right), I guess it doesn’t really matter.</p>
<p>October47-- Just keep at it. and keep at it. There’s no race to the finish line on this one and you will, eventually, find something passable to do.</p>
<p>Once you find that thing, be the first one at work in morning, and always leave AFTER your boss.</p>
<p>99% of life is showing up. Good luck to you.</p>
<p>ETA: I dont think there’s a “wrong” choice between Bucknell and Lehigh, though I know the neighborhood can be an issue. Still, Lehigh is a great school. No worries at all about that. It is well known in DC and New York and Chicago. (Don’t know about the west coast, though)</p>
<p>When you’re searching for a job out of college you should be doing it through your school’s recruitment center, not sending out applications online. Companies recruiting through your school will have a different hiring timeline.</p>
<p>It all sounds well and good to say there’s 50k jobs for 100k students, but that’s the 50th percentile. And being underemployed for a spell isn’t bad persay. Not optimal, but certainly nothing like if unemployment was that high. As for the basic premise of the argument, I’m not sure I agree. It’s a classic chicken and egg concept - did the lack of quality candidates come first or the lack of jobs. Outsourcing made a major impact, but it didn’t do this all on its own. Look at Germany vs France for a prime example. Both are fairly restrictive on imports (from outside the EU), yet there’s a huge dispersion in unemployment rates.</p>
<p>Well, when you look at the economics in Germany, you are also looking at a country which restricts the percentage pay an executive can recieve relative to the pay of the other workers at the firm. So, it’s a multiple, and they don’t get these massive bonuses by off-shoring, or maximizing shareholder profit. Their pay is tied to the level of pay of their in-country employees. Also, there is no benefit to them to push pay so low it is unlivable, as they, too, have a consequence for that.</p>
<p>It’s a system I think would be so much better than what we have going on here. The executives would then be accountable to employees as well as shareholders, and it’s a good model for real prosperity, as opposed to fast buck profit taking, which is akin, in my mind, to the practice of deforestation, as opposed to the practice of taking every third tree and replanting.</p>
<p>I don’t know any company in France that willingly hires lots of new grads. The cost of benefits, the restrictions on who you can terminate and why, etc. makes it very expensive to hire a 22 or 23 year old who really isn’t going to be productive for a very long time.</p>
<p>But back to the original issue- so fine, the demographers on this thread win. We don’t have enough jobs, the economy stinks, it’s either the fault of the Boomers or the Greatest Generation or someone even earlier, etc. The deficit is too big and spending is out of control.</p>
<p>Ok. But you’re 22 years old, about to graduate, and you have no job. Seems to me like you’d be eliciting help from people who are already employed vs. attacking our fondness for social security (which we’ve been paying into since we were 16 and which will most likely be gone by the time we retire).</p>
<p>Maybe some of you might even like to know how to ace a phone interview? You’re sure to have one or five or ten along the way. Many of the new grads who do phone interviews shoot themselves in the foot.</p>
<p>But back to our original program. Half the new grads are unemployed and we need to blame someone STAT.</p>
<p>Son had this situation too. He started the semester in January but they wanted him immediately. Early February, he dropped all of his classes except for one and started working there. His job is about 30 miles away from his school and he has two courses remaining after the current semester. I’ve always told him that you can always go to school but you can’t always get a job.</p>
<p>This works if you’re not too far from your target job and your school will allow you to finish your degree part-time or if they’ll take credits from another school in your target job city.</p>
<p>That’s definitely a policy I follow! Thanks for the advice and encouragement! </p>
<p>On phone interviews:</p>
<p>I’ve done a couple of successful phone interviews. I think my advice would be: it might be tempting to move around during the interview. You don’t really think while you’re talking on the phone so you might start pacing, shuffling through papers, or even be on the computer looking through your resume, company info, etc. without realizing it so do the interview somewhere where you can sit down and not get distracted.</p>
<p>Practice doing phone interviews just like you would regular interviews. Get someone to allow you to call them and practice the interview. </p>
<p>Also, make sure you can do the interview somewhere where you will have privacy. Having the doorbell ring, dog start barking like crazy, or a neighbor start playing music loudly during the interview will not only not sound good to the employer, but it might throw you off track. I know at my school the career services office will set you up in an office space if you need somewhere to do a phone interview, so I would look into something like that if you’re still in school.</p>
<p>A systematic problem with these debates is that people confuse arguments about individual success with arguments about the overall employment situation. </p>
<p>For example, the argument that unemployed students would be employed if they had better resumes is valid. But if students improve their resumes, it will only have a small affect on overall employment of college graduates, if any at all.</p>
<p>It may be clear from your perspective, but it’s really not. The job I’m at now weeded out something like 60% of the first round for not knowing what the work entailed alone. Apparently reading the two paragraph blurb in the job description was too much to ask. And this was at one of the better business schools in the country… You can argue there’s only so many jobs to go around, but I find that a dubious proposition at best. We wouldn’t be recruiting H1-Bs if that was the case - despite the rhetoric, they aren’t given abusive workloads or worse pay compared to domestic counterparts (yes, there are some examples of this but they’re the exception rather than the rule).</p>
<p>Talking with H today about this thread. When he graduated from college with his BS in Zoology (yeah, really useful), he got a low level job testing vitamins by injecting them into rabbits. It was a job that did not require someone with a college degree, LOL! He was definitely underemployed.</p>
<p>But he used that lab experience to get a better lab job, which led to an even better lab job, which made him realize that he needed to go back to school to get a Ph.D. He’s been working in the biotech industry for the past 25 years and doing very well.</p>
<p>So take heart, new graduates…and don’t be afraid to be underemployed. With luck, it won’t last forever but will be a stepping stone to bigger and better things!</p>
<p>“So take heart, new graduates…and don’t be afraid to be underemployed. With luck, it won’t last forever but will be a stepping stone to bigger and better things!”</p>
<p>This statement is so true. Sometimes, you have to start from the bottom and work in undesirable situations to figure out whether a a specific career is right for you. It is those experiences that will help college graduates become more appreciative and hard-working employees in the long-term.</p>
<p>“You can argue there’s only so many jobs to go around, but I find that a dubious proposition at best” </p>
<p>I don’t agree. With the way the economy is there is only so many good/college graduate level entry-level jobs out there. If every graduate, every year, was perfect, there would still only be so much need…</p>
<p>For example, companies that used to hire 20-30 people now may only hire 5-10 each year. Just because they only hire 10 new grads this year does not mean that there was a “lack of quality candidates”, it means that there was not a business need. Overall, good companies will always find enough quality candidates competing for their limited openings. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the fact that a lot of job openings have increased the qualifications needed (example: Companies that used to interview/hire students with GPAs 3.0 & above now concentrate on students with GPAs 3.5 and above) supports my argument that the job market has gotten more competitive (which I though was pretty obvious imo). Having a hard time buying your argument that the lack of jobs is due to the lack of quality candidates. </p>
<p>I’m speaking of business majors. Perhaps other math/science disciplines are different.</p>
<p>I wanted to just add a little bit of flavor - I’m currently a 4th year student in a 6-year STEM program at my local instate university and from my observations …</p>
<p>Those that had a good internships, good interviewing skills, and a decent GPA all had multiple offers in their hands when they graduated. They spent the last 4 years working very hard to get to this point and were rewarded with excellent job offers across the country at F500 management training programs, big consulting firms and banks, etc. </p>
<p>There are jobs out there and they are very competitive, but if I could tell my peers anything it would be to START EARLY. The first few years of easier classes boost your GPA. That first summer doing a terrible low paying internship leads to a great one your second year. Applying for internships hones your interview skills and gives you 4 years of practice. </p>
<p>I could go on and on. So is it a lack of quality candidates? To a degree. All of my friends who I would consider qualified candidates have landed excellent jobs. </p>
<p>For those who didn’t do the above … well you are competing against people with a 4 year head start, what do you expect?</p>
<p>zoosermom, you are spot on. H and I had dinner tonight w/ our neighbor whose son is president of a Chamber of Commerce for the largest city in a metro area of 2.5+ million people. He says the media has been downplaying un/underemployment for the last 3 years. Businesses are not hiring because they dont know what Obamacare is going to cost them - along with what additional payroll burdens will be forced upon them. Businesses have seem SUTA more than triple, Workmans Comp insurance has skyrocketed, payroll software had to be retooled to accommodate the change in employee social security tax withholdings and of course the fear of higher state and federal business taxes. It becomes easy to see why businesses are limiting the number of new hires and quietly outsourcing work.</p>
<p>In my opinion having any kind of job is better than being unemployed. A lot of students are afraid to take entry-level jobs… </p>
<p>-In what? Some places do not even have entry level. Now of course you could take an entry level truck driving job and in five years you could be… a college educated truck driver.</p>
<p>The exception may be where a company wants to do a project because there
is a return but they can’t find enough people with the skills to do the
project at the current time so they put the project on hold.</p>
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<p>I hadn’t heard about the higher GPA requirement. The ads that I’ve
looked at still look for 3.0 and higher. It may well be that their
screening software just drops everyone below 3.5 though. I have seen
more companies looking for graduate degrees where I used to see them
looking for undergraduate degrees.</p>
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<p>My son’s organization hires about 800 people a year. It appears that
there’s a fair amount of people coming and going. He went to his
orientation and it was a classroom of new hires. They apparently do
this every week.</p>
<p>That’s not true, because you’re competing on a global marketplace. If the US was known to have significantly better quality workers, then jobs on the whole come back here. My example of Germany earlier was in part to illustrate this - German workers understand shared sacrifice, which is why it’s done so well. Earlier comments on mandated compensation levels (not entirely accurate anymore, btw) are irrelevant. The reason Germany is an attractive business environment is the government had the testicular fortitude to pass pension and benefit reform a decade ago, and unions work symbiotically with companies. This is on top of high worker quality.</p>
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<p>While true, it’s an incomplete picture. My company doesn’t target a number of people to hire, we just recruit constantly and take candidates we like as they come. Also, not every business is lowering recruiting quotas, some are actually raising them.</p>