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Two weeks after graduating from The University of Wisconsin in 2006, my son Noah was on a plane to New York City where he was about to start his professional career.He had the job lined up and one he had sent his regrets to before he had graduated. Noah was not alone - all of his friends found jobs either before or within weeks of graduating from college.
Like Noah, their biggest dilemma was which job to accept. This year Noah decided to go back to graduate school. He only applied to one school. A very good business school. A hard to get into business school. Despite my suggestion that he might want to have a back up school, Noah was confident that his high GPA, his solid GRE scores,and his work experience would place him in the accepted category.
It did not. In talking with the admissions office after he got his, "regret to inform you" letter he was told in any other year he would have been part of the class of 2011. It's just that this year they had double the applicants.
Students who realize there are few jobs to go to have decided that this is a great time to go to graduate school.
For Noah it's a blessing in disguise. It means he has another year as a ski instructor in Colorado. It has also given him a new perspective of himself. As he told me, "I was too confident. This has made me even more determined to go to graduate school and next year,I'm going to retake the GRE's to raise my score and I'll apply to several schools."
While more students are avoiding the dismal job market by extending their education, not every student can afford to continue paying for educations that already have them in debt for many years.
Unfortunately, trying to find a job to help pay off that debt is really hard.
The most optimistic research suggests graduates in a recession earn less than their recession-free counterparts for up to 10 years; some studies say those effects last a lifetime. While experts say it’s too soon to tell how the crisis might permanently alter job prospects and spending habits, all agree that it isn’t a short-term problem.
Graduates need “to keep their expectations in place while they endure the next couple of years,” says Phil Gardner, who directs the Collegiate Employment Research Institute (CERI).
Last week my friend Terri got a phone call from her daughter who just graduated from Georgetown University. The daughter very much wants to stay in D.C. On the phone call the daughter excitedly told my friend that she had just landed an unpaid internship. The daughter was ecstatic. My friend Terri had to remind her daughter that she needed to get a paying job or move back to Minnesota. The phone call ended with the daughter bursting into tears.
So far there are no statistics on whether there's an increase in the number of unpaid internships but the Associated Press' Joyce M. Rosenberg writes that these unpaid internships are on the increase.
O'Connell & Goldberg, a PR firm in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., hasn't been able to hire full-time staffers the past few months, so having two unpaid interns this summer will help fill the gap. If the interns do well, "when the economy turns around, obviously they'll be my first picks" for permanent jobs, co-owner Barbara Goldberg said.
Nancy Shenker has just hired her first unpaid interns for her Thornwood, N.Y.-based marketing firm, theONswitch. The economy was a factor in her deciding to have unpaid interns, but she also is impressed by students' commitment to the job even if it doesn't have a paycheck.
4,100 of this year's college grads will be teaching in poor communities through the Teach for America program. 35,000 students wanted those jobs and for the first time students who met the programs criteria were turned away.
Schools where Teach for America is the No. 1 employer of graduating seniors:
Albion College
Barnard College
Brown University
Emory University
Georgetown University
Loyola of New Orleans
Marquette University
Mount Holyoke College
Spelman College
Trinity College, Connecticut
Tulane University
University of Chicago
University of Connecticut
University of San Diego
Vanderbilt University
Schools with more than 5 percent of the senior class applying:
Spelman, 25 percent
Yale, 16 percent
Princeton University and Wellesley College, 15 percent
Brown, University of Chicago, Haverford College, 14 percent
Harvard, Bowdoin College, 13 percent
Columbia University, Cornell, Georgetown, Swarthmore College, Duke University, 11 percent
University of Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Amherst College, William & Mary, Tulane, 10 percent
University of Michigan, 8 percent
