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<p>Not necessarily. The story makes the person in question to be smart but lazy, with the latter characteristic not being a good one to have graduating into a recession. While Cal Poly SLO had an impressively high placement rate for civil engineering graduates even in 2009, a relatively lazy student there would likely be one of the minority who did not get a job.</p>
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<p>A 2009 graduate would have entered school in 2005, just as real estate and construction was getting very bubbly and frothy. So a civil engineering graduate then would probably have gotten a job even if s/he barely tried to find one.</p>