Hiring for new college graduates is down 40 percent from the previous year, according to a recent survey.
Large employers a year ago anticipated to hire an average of 114 college graduates with a bachelor’s degree per company. They ended up hiring 64, said Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, which conducted the survey.
“That’s a lot of ground loss,” Gardner said.
The survey collected information from more than 1,800 companies nationwide, including large Fortune 100 companies and small Austin-based consulting and accounting firms, Gardner said. He said the projected labor contractions for last year were greater than he expected.
“Last year, we thought labor would contract by about 8 percent,” he said. “When November rolled around and things really got bad, it contracted another 35 or 49 percent.”
Gardner said graduates will have to bring more than a degree to the table when looking for a job in coming years. Employers are looking for employees who have critical-thinking skills, the abilities to work with a team and to work on a project without supervision, he said.
One thing Gardner said graduates won’t have to worry about is competing with more experienced workers who have been laid off.
Of the companies surveyed, “only 11 percent said they might consider someone with more experience but in general they said no,” he said.
Companies may not be willing to pay the experienced employees what they want, he said. Or employees with experience may come to a job with certain expectations. If those expectations are not met, those employees may leave, Gardner said.
“People who graduated last year and a year before are not positioned that well in the labor market,” he said. “There will be competition that way.”
Matt Berndt, director of Career Services for the College of Communication, said not everyone in every industry and in every state is affected the same way.
“Nationwide the unemployment rate is about 10 percent right now, if not surpassing that,” he said.
Berndt said the career services counselors advise their students in the same ways they always have. Berndt advises students to start their job searches early, and make sure they let potential employers know why they are a good fit for the job.
“Students who think that they’re going to be able to go find their dream job right now are not being realistic,” he said.
Like credit companies who are still lending money, but only to safe investments, companies are still hiring, but only people they are sure about, he said.
Electrical engineering senior Dan Ruegger said the engineering field is competitive even without the added stress of a recession.
“I do stress about it,” Ruegger said. “Hopefully, I’ll get a job. If not, I’ll come back and get an MBA.”
Ruegger said he has a friend who, despite work experience and all the right qualifications, is not hearing back from the oil companies she interviewed with.
The survey indicates that while hiring rates for recent graduates are bleak, they may level off in 2010 as the economy begins to rebound.
“We have reached where economists think the unemployment rate is going to go,” Berndt said.
Berndt said unemployment has hit its lowest point and will now slowly start to rebuild itself.
“It’s not going to get much worse,” he said. “It’s going to get better, but it’s going to get better slowly.”
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