<p>Not too shocking. Have to give the kids graduating this year some slack about finding a job right away.</p>
<p>From the COHE
Job Market Will Be Brutal for This Year's College Seniors, Survey Finds</p>
<p>Some students graduating from college this year may end up feeling as if they are too late to the job market. Employers plan to hire nearly 22 percent fewer students from this years graduating class than they did in 2008, according to a survey released on Wednesday by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.</p>
<p>The prediction ends a five-year run of good or at least steady news for job-seeking graduates. The results are based on the hiring expectations of employers, more than half of whom reported changing their plans in the last several months.</p>
<p>The plunge in planned hiring is countrywide, but especially deep in the Northeast (38.9 percent decrease) and in the West (31.9 percent decrease). The association also reports an unparalleled level of uncertainty about hiring plans.</p>
<p>The couple of years right after the dotcom crash were brutal, too, especially for anyone with a tech or science degree (at least on the West Coast). A friend’s kid with a degree in computer sciences worked at a retail store for a while until he was able to land a part-time job at MSFT, and that’s just one of the many anecdotes I heard of. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that by the time our younger is out of college, the situation will be better.</p>
<p>hmom5…well, not that I haven’t seriously considered nepotism, but I’m going to have a hard time justifying hiring a philosophy major into a scientific & engineering firm…</p>
<p>alas, Hanna, we actually have a few JDs in my firm’s environmental consulting ranks, but the pay scales between my do-good field and the typical law firm are measured in orders of magnitude. That aside, we certainly don’t discriminate!</p>
<p>I keep trying to tell D that many college grads may be looking at the internships she is interested in and not to dawdle. S actually had the audacity to wait till the last day to tell person in charge whether or not he was going to take the offered job. And we wonder why parents get gray? Aghhhh!
(BTW, how does one make an angry face emoticon?)</p>
<p>PC, I see graduates of top 10 law schools taking 80% pay cuts just to find a job, any job. If they have health insurance, they feel they are lucky, and they are right. Environmental consulting is actually an interesting, desirable job! If you’d like to see what they have to offer your firm, PM me; I could steer some terrific people your way (both recent grads and experienced JDs).</p>
<p>Some economists are anticipating that unemployment (which currently stands at a national average of 6.7 percent) will reach as high as 9.0 percent before it starts to retreat. If that happens, it would be the highest jobless rate since 1983.</p>
<p>This is from midwestbusiness.com. I post it because, in 1983, I graduated into what was then considered to be the worst job market in the [then] last 20 years! It was a pretty dismal outlook then, so I can sympathize with how this year’s grads are feeling.</p>
<p>I feel that the way internships have become so commonplace has been a problem for young graduates finding paying jobs. Those kids who can afford to have mom and dad help out or finance their internships have all the cards for many of these internships that pay little or no money. With companies looking to save money, there may be an increase in these positions. I don’t think that a good thing.</p>
<p>Son’s firm still sponsors their rather large summer internship program (which pays very well). That used to be the ticket to employment there. However, there’s currently a firm-wide freeze on hiring. In fact, a third round of layoffs went down last week, mostly middle managers.</p>
<p>I heard overall engineering hiring dropped substantially last year and this year will be much worse. Boeing is laying off thousands of them. Microsoft is not hiring many CS people this year and cut quite a few in some areas. Which engineering firms would be hiring–not automotive, not heavy equipment, not building design. Those are big areas.</p>
