<p>It wasn’t something we thought about when daughter (Rice '07) or WildChild (Penn '10) entered college, but I sure would be in the current economy! From what I am told by people in higher education and administration, post-graduation employment figures are being fudged massively by schools. As oldfort said, the key is not whether the Wharton grad is working (although let’s not be picky right now), but is he or she nannying or working in the finance job they wanted. I just met a personable young woman who graduated from Sewanee in 2007, spent a couple of years moving around and came back to Nashville last year. It took her 10 months to get a job. I can’t emphasize how tough the market is right now. The schools with career centers that actually help the kids on an individual basis instead of just letting them pile their resumes up in front of companies that come to a career fair should be given a second look. A long-time poster on this forum (legendofmax) has publicly shared his job search struggles with us all and he is a Wharton grad (August 2009) with no job.<br>
The need to consider this varies by profession, and if your kid is pretty sure he or she is headed for grad or professional school, the importance of the job placement assistance diminishes.
Good topic.</p>
<p>My son is a 2009 graduate of Pomona College. He was fortunate to have many equally strong college/university choices when he graduated from high school 4 years ago. He chose Pomona for the small size, academic reputation and beautiful location. Now after a very difficult 7 month job search he finally landed a full time position in his field of study - economics.He was an honors Economics student with solid recommendations and internship experience. Since graduation ( and particularly as his loans are coming due) he has commented to me frequently on how poorly Pomona’s Career Services served him both as a student and as a recent graduate/job seeker. Compared to his 2 older siblings who attended equally well regarded institutions I would say he is absolutely correct. As a parent I can recall only a few communications from their office over his undergraduate career. Short of helping fine tune his resume he received very little direction in his internship and subsequent job searches. The office gave him an incomplete( much of the contact information was incorrect) list of alumni connections in various business fields with the specific instructions not to ask for a job(ask for career guidance only!). He was very disappointed that after 2 months of trying he only received 2 cursory replies from the many letters/emails he sent out. The fact that Pomona has very poor name recognition outside of California did not help his cause. In retrospect he is grateful for the solid education and friendships he developed at Pomona but like many of the classmates he has stayed in touch with he was disappointed in the lack of career support the school offered. He has told me often through the process he would have been better off forgoing the loans and attending our state university as in terms of career guidance there was not value added in Pomona. For all prospective students and parents be careful what you are purchasing - do your homework on the career placement side.</p>
<p>Second on that, Arizonadad. I have a good friend whose daughter graduated from Pomona in 2009 and could not find a job. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but only met dead ends in her search. She was waitressing in Austin and then got a low-level job in Dallas, but it might lead to something more. That was after about 7 months.</p>
<p>Arizonadad - congratulations on your son finding a job. 7 months may have seem like forever to your son, but in today’s economy he is very lucky.</p>
<p>To put it briefly, no. I’m looking at grad school immediately after my undergrad, so career services or placement wasn’t a big deal. However, when looking at grad schools, that may become an issue. Depending on what the economy looks like six years from now, it could have a big or small impact in my grad school decision.</p>
<p>No and yes. The No comes from looking at how the Career Center performs but the Yes comes from thinking about how the alumni network and school reputation seem to help (or not) and from making sure that the kids are going to schools that, if they perform well, will help and not handicap them from being admitted to the graduate schools of their choice.</p>
<p>There are lots of ways parents can help their kids in the Career Center sweepstakes even if they are unfamiliar with the industry or profession the kid is interested in, or even if they don’t have much practical experience with job hunting outside of their own geography and field.</p>
<p>Encourage your kid to get help early on with resume writing, personality testing, mock interviewing, all that jazz. Most kids show up in November of senior year and discover that many companies have already made most of their offers to the students who interned the past summer (oops) or that first round interviews took place in October with the “resume drop” in late September. If your kid hasn’t done a thing about finding a job or exploring career options until senior year-- well, it’s a little late in the game.</p>
<p>Don’t let your kid spin pie in the sky fantasies about the bohemian lifestyle they’re planning unless they’ve got a trust fund. Junior year abroad is great; being a nanny in Ibiza with afternoons off is a hoot; spending spring break in Daytona or Cancun is fabulous. But when you realize that there are tens of thousands of college kids who spend junior year indexing a professor’s book and fact-checking articles for publication; spend summers working the corporate grind, and spend spring break interviewing like crazy for summer jobs, your kid will come off as entitled and clueless if he or she expects a fulfilling and lucrative career to fall into the lap.</p>
<p>And finally- encourage your kid to stay flexible with regards to geography, compensation, lifestyle, etc. if they hope to land a “real job” after graduation. Every college kid wants to live in San Francisco or the East Village or Georgetown. But the real jobs may in fact be in Cincinnati Ohio or Paramus New Jersey or Fort Worth Texas. Yes, the market stinks right now. It will take longer to find a job than it did in 2005. But if your kid wants a job in TV production that pays 50K with benefits in a “fun city” with other young people it may be a tough slog.</p>
<p>Absolutely this is a factor. </p>
<p>Of all the schools we are looking at , Agnes Scott College is number one. There are many reasons, but one huge reason is because they have more internships than young women to fill them with. They have a special partnership with the CDC for internships. They have great alumni who are available for mentoring. You bet that it’s important. </p>
<p>I think that not looking at what a school can offer in this regard is short sighted, at best.</p>
<p>Yes - this is a very important factor for me (since I’m making the investment…). But unfortunately, it’s very difficult to get usable data due to the issues mentioned above. I’ve been getting a feel for the quality of the internship opportunities and career placement from the tour and info session, asking questions and exploring the web-sites.</p>
<p>Yes, our kids have the greatest responsibility to position themselves for relevant employment after graduation, but I’m trying to figure out how the various schools S2 has been accepted at are looked at by future employers. Many employers have their favorite schools to recruit from, and in this economy, being at those schools should bring an advantage. </p>
<p>S2 would be happy at any of the colleges he’s been accepted at, and he and I know that he would get a great education at any of them. The big question on my mind, is which one is the best investment (in time and money)? And, is Liberal Arts still the best preparation for a wide variety of careers?</p>
<p>It’s so tough to find a job right now – I was very fortunate to land something here in New York City, having been residing in Texas during my post-graduation months without transportation. Ever since moving here, I’ve since befriended a handful of new people, including a few Princeton grads (and these girls were easily 3.6+ GPA students). They were both laid off from their jobs earlier this year and have only recently found new employment. It was eerie how similar our stories were – all those nights spent resume-spamming job boards, trying to network through people we knew, hitting up alumni, picking the college OCR postings incessantly, and so forth. Those months during the fall were the worst. Nobody was hiring – things didn’t pick up until January.</p>
<p>So, so, so glad that’s all over with. But honestly, the moral of this story (and I’ve had this discussion already with some of my Princeton friends here in NYC) is that a school doesn’t bring guarantees, contrary to popular high-school belief. I know, even today, a fair number of fellow '09 Wharton grads without jobs, in addition to a bunch from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, too. It’s a sort of lesson we all “knew” a long time ago but didn’t really heed as being true.</p>
<p>It comes down to accessing every venue that you can. For me, that was making calls to Wharton Career Services, joining alumni communities, applying to things on OCR/Monster/Craigslist/Studentjobs/etc, meeting friends of friends, reaching out to the CC community, looking up openings in local directories, etc. Even the Wharton name won’t guarantee you anything (many job openings rejected me without even an interview, even though I often had perfect credentials for the job), and you still have to pull through the interviews given that you land them (I am terribly shy, and so this was a huge challenge for me). And even then, doing well on the interview won’t guarantee that the job is still there for you later (I’ve had four job openings revoked due to internal company restructuring – and I know for a fact that I had landed three of those prior to the postings getting yanked – one in Redwood, CA, another in Chicago, and a third one in Houston).</p>
<p>My point though is that there is a huge set of skills that I had to acquire AFTER graduation in order to land work.</p>
<p>D1’s school had a Junior Parents’ Weekend–one of the mandatory break out sessions was put on by the Career Center (or whatever it is called), letting us know what’s available for students. Of course, the student has to actually spend some time there…</p>
<p>The most impressive school that I’ve heard my friend talk about is Princeton. According to her, the school puts a student in contact with an alum 20 years or so her senior in the area that she is interested in as a career–that kind of info/contact can be worth its weight in gold.</p>
<p>We didn’t specifically look at job placement, by D wants a career in a specific field and the best location for this is the area where her school is located. She has an internship already (as a freshman) in her field which is providing her with great experience and contacts. This would not have been possible if she had attended school in another geographic location.</p>
<p>I considered it but, frankly, I wasn’t very impressed with the career services of any of the liberal arts schools my daughter considered. Perhaps I didn’t know what questions to ask but they all seemed to say the same thing and I am not convinced that their lac curriculum and bucolic locations helps the kids get jobs except as teachers at their former prep schools. At the other extreme is the major urban university attended by one of my kids. I’m VERY impressed with its career services.</p>
<p>Statistics on these job placements can be very fuzzy because they have to be self-reported (similar to stats on most grad school acceptances), so I didn’t look at those, but I did consider the career center and the network at Smith, it was definitely one of the things that attracted me. I especially liked that it was a “lifetime resource” meaning that if you’re a Smith grad, and you’re 30 or 50 or any age, and you want to change careers or just give your resume a polish, the CDO (Career Development Office) will still help you, just as if you were an undergrad. Plus I thought it was cool how they marketed the networking at Smith as an “Ageless Women’s Network” as opposed to an “Old Boy’s Club”</p>
<p>And really, the alum networking and connections turned out to be superb for me. So many Smithies are in so many fields and they’re always happy to help out another grad with an internship or a job interview or whatever. I really wanted a school where people were connected like that, and where they were competitive in the workplace but collaborative with each other. Which I can say has definitely been my experience.</p>
<p>This is a very interesting topic. We are still on the journey. DD has yet to choose her school. However, each school that she is considering has made a strong selling point of job placement. She will be a CS major and depending on the school, it may be in the college of engineering or science. Nevertheless, she has received many assurances of internships, co-ops and job placement. And it is funny, I just recently had a conversation with a dad who said he didn’t think that colleges should discuss job placement, that going to college is not vocational training. In this economy, I find it a reality that must be faced.</p>
<p>Son goes to our large flagship. Career services have been ranked very highly. Students gave it a big thumbs up in surveys. Yes, we considered it. When he started, most kids in his field were getting jobs- this is no longer the case. </p>
<p>Our son has had very little help from this group.The career fairs are a complete zoo. Companies interviewing on campus have been pulling back. He feels like a number. </p>
<p>His GPA is high. He’s in the honors college. He is involved. But he did not get an internship last year, as a junior. The interviews he did get were on his own. A number of these jobs were canceled mid-process (one after he interviewed FOUR times). And he can’t find a job now. He gets emails from companies for commission only jobs…AFLAC and Financial Advisors. This is not what he wants to do. We’ve encouraged him to continue schooling…but he’s not interested in that right now. </p>
<p>We are encouraging him to use the large alumni network. To set up informational interviews. To make contacts, slow and steady. Hopefully, things will continue to improve and he’ll get a job. One thing he’s happy about: No loans! He would be a mess right now if he had huge loans. (and we would be too if they were ours!)</p>
<p>A very easy thing to look at is what companies actually go to the school to recruit. If you want to be a CS major, do companies like Google or Microsoft recruit at a school you are interested in, or only insurance/consumer IT firms recruit there. It would give you a very good indication on how good a department is. </p>
<p>Unless a parent could afford his child indefinitely, it’s always good to know there is employment after graduation.</p>
<p>@toneranger - Your son’s situation doesn’t sound all that different from a lot of my fellow classmates in the class of 2009. Even at schools with good career services, it’s hard to break into the market now for everyone. Especially so if you only have academic experience and no relatable internship or other work experience. Even on campuses where there is a lot of recruiting (like Smith), recruiters are cutting back for both jobs and internships (esp. paid ones). I’ve had a friend told point blank by a recruiter for a major investment firm that if the economy was better they would have hired her, but as things stood, they could only take one student from our school and they had picked the one they wanted. </p>
<p>One thing that’s helped me and a lot of my friends is to widen our perspective at least for now. Taking things like commission or contract work temporarily can at least get some experience on the resume and ensures some kind of salary coming in, which provides security while you’re looking for what you really want to do. I have friends who are temping, even friends who are interning again, all in hopes of getting enough experience to attract an employer. And yes, career fairs are a zoo and not often a good use of time unless you have NO clue what field to go into. In that case they can at least show you what’s out there. </p>
<p>Definitely encourage him to try to set up informational interviews. So few kids do this and they are so helpful! Especially for the first job, networking is really, really essential, but a lot of kids avoid it because they don’t really understand what it is or how to do it and they’re afraid it will be awkward. Some career centers may offer seminars on how to network, how to use the resources in the career office to network, and proper ways to behave when dealing with alums about job situations. a little prep can really defuse an awkward scenario.</p>
<p>Very, very few of my older child’s friends (college class of 2009) have permanent, career-track jobs, even now. (And when I say “very, very few”, what I really mean is “none, unless I expand the notion of ‘friend’ beyond recognition”.) They are all funking around with a mix of internships, subsistence part-time jobs, freelancing, fellowships, project hires. My daughter, who is doing Teach For America, is practically the only person she knows with only one employer, and employer-provided health insurance. Many kids are kicking themselves for not applying to funded graduate programs, and indeed the ones who are in funded PhD programs seem much better off than their peers, even if there is no reasonable prospect of permanent academic jobs in their fields.</p>
<p>All this despite active career offices at all of their colleges, and despite lengthy resumes full of meaningful job experience. Although none of these kids are engineers or are interested in finance, all of them are smart, hardworking, creative, and proactive about their careers. They ARE all surviving, and only a couple of them are living with their parents, precisely because they are great at scrabbling stuff together and taking opportunities where they can find them. This is just a historically awful time to be 23 and looking for a job in any but a handful of sectors.</p>
<p>At some level, it’s probably a great time to compare the effectiveness of college career offices. When times were good, whether they were effective or not hardly mattered; now it does. But the entry-level market has been so terrible over the past two years that it hardly seems fair to judge anyone’s lack of success in it.</p>
<p>I am at Club Med now here they pay their workers (GOs) only few hundred $ a week, but include room and board. There are so many older 20 something working here until the economy turns around. Some of them are doing finance, reception, boutique, sports… They figure the expeience would help to build their resume. Plus the fact the weather is beautiful. It beats NE weaather.</p>