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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Brother, can you spare a job offer? Philip Jones sounds a little bit like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, holding up his arms amid a stampeding crowd and shouting: "Remain calm! All is well!" Jones, director of undergraduate career services and assistant dean of Yale College. readily acknowledges that it's a tough job market for soon-to-graduate seniors. But things are not so grim as to warrant panic, he insists. Data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers "suggests that college-level hiring is nationally going to be down about 10 percent over last year -- to about where we were in 2006," Jones says. "It's down, but it's not out." "I'm not trying to be Pollyanna about this," Jones adds. '"It does mean [students] are going to have to work harder, compete harder, for those positions that do exist." The best-known path for job-seeking Yalies is to interview with the finance and consulting firms that flock to campus each fall, handing out fat job offers to happy seniors. In 2006, the most recent year available, 18 percent of Yale College graduates took jobs in business or finance, according to survey figures from the university's Office of Institutional Research. That was the third most popular choice, after graduate and professional school (24 percent) and education jobs (19 percent). But this year, the number of on-campus interviews declined to about 2,600, Jones says -- a 15 percent drop from 2007-08 -- meaning that would-be bankers need to look elsewhere. Employer advertising during recruiting season was also down "rather significantly," Yale Daily News publisher Jason Chen '10 reports by e-mail, "simply because many of the companies that used to place these ads no longer exist, or are not hiring." And the drop in interviews tells only part of the story, Jones notes. "The real question" is how many of those interviews will produce job offers. "In a typical year, we would end up with about 500 offers, of which about 300 are accepted," he says. (Some students get more than one offer.) This year, however, offers could drop off more sharply than interviews, as employers decide whether the openings they were recruiting for exist after all. "They could turn around and say, 'No, no,'" Jones says. "Or they could say, 'Stimulus package came through, it's looking pretty good; we'll hire 50.'" The next couple of months will provide answers. At the graduate school, "it's still a little early to tell exactly what's happening," says Victoria Blodgett, assistant dean and career services director. "It's not that there's definite closed doors" for new PhDs seeking academic jobs. "It's uncertainty. The language you're hearing [from universities] is a pause or a freeze or a delay." On the undergraduate side, Jones emphasizes that, even in boom years, on-campus interviews (about two-thirds of which are with finance or consulting companies) yield employment for only a fraction of Yale seniors. Most pursue jobs with employers who don't recruit on campus. He issues a plea for alumni to help -- not by giving preferential treatment to Yalies, but simply by letting his office know about openings. In any case, students who did hope to land a finance job "are being encouraged," Jones says, "to think about Plan B and Plan C." That's exactly what Patrick Sedden '09 is doing. The Dallas native could serve as a case study for Jones's job-hunting prescription. "At first, I was looking at finance," Sedden says. "I did a bunch of interviews, but that didn't work out too well. A lot of companies didn't make offers, and even canceled simple things like informational sessions." Now, he says, "I'm looking in a different direction. People who want to go into finance are looking at smaller boutique firms and getting more creative." He's doing that, too -- but with the Wall Street option less likely, he's also rethinking whether finance is the right career for him. A wide receiver on the Bulldogs football team, Sedden says he's now considering graduate school, "which I never thought about before. And I'm thinking about coaching" -- perhaps combining the two in a graduate assistant program that would put him to work coaching while helping to pay for his advanced degree. "Honestly," he says, "I'm just trying to figure out who I am." |
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