Eric Dash: New economy, old ways

Over the summer, the possibility of a severe economic decline was a topic that my friends and I would have found laughable. After all, we went to Penn. Wharton. No downturn was going to affect us.

But as the economy continued to freefall and we headed back to school, the tenor of our conversations changed from light-hearted humor to biting irony.

In the old New Economy of Fall 2000, I pointed out, investment bank recruiters held meet-and-greet sessions at posh clubs, where they handed out plushy towels and hyped cushy job offers with mind-opening possibilities.

In the new New Economy of Fall 2001, these same recruiters now hold information sessions in campus auditoriums, can't afford to give out the plastic pizza box tables that they declare mankind's greatest invention, and attempt to convince nervous seniors that those mind-opening possibilities aren't closed altogether.

These days, though, the nature of our job-talk is a mix of anger, frustration and sobering pangs of reality. At Homecoming, recent Penn grads -- who just six months before flaunted corporate-sponsored T-shirts and double-digit signing bonuses -- now spoke of corporate-sponsored pink slips and severance packages. Dreams of McKinsey have been replaced by the fear of "fries with that?" at McDonald's.

One needs only to sit a few minutes in the waiting rooms of On-Campus Recruiting to understand the anxiety of the Class of 2002. If you can't see it in their eyes, you can hear it in their voices: Will I ever get a job?

Indeed, there's no doubt that the job market is bad. It's just not as bad as it seems. Perception is worse than reality.

Amidst the job-obsessed, pre-professional culture of the University of Pennsylvania, it's quite easy to get caught up in the hysteria of the present.

With every "ding" letter, it is easy to forget that the economy into which recent Penn graduates -- friends and classmates of this year's seniors -- entered over the past few years was perhaps the strongest economy in recent history.

And with every complaint that "nobody's hiring," it's even easier still to lose sight of the fact that Penn graduates are highly desirable candidates, whose starting salaries will still be higher than the average college graduate in their major.

For instance, Wharton accounting concentrators raked in $44,667 last year compared with a national average starting salary of $39,720, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Recent Penn psychology graduates, on balance, earned starting salaries of $33,780 compared to the $29,952 national average reported by NACE.

While things are certainly worse than they were for the last two years, the folks at Career Services say they aren't drastically different. And it could be argued that today's Penn seniors are much better off than their counterparts 10 years ago -- the last time graduates entered the work force during a recession. Consider some data from Penn's Career Services.

During the 1992 academic year, more than 322 employers took part in on-campus recruiting. In 2001, over 383 have already signed up.

During the 1991-1992 school year, Penn students were granted roughly 12,000 job interviews. In 2001, they'll have far fewer than the 17,000 of recent years, but far more than that.

While these statistics tell little about the actual number of Penn seniors that employers hire each year -- a figure that the Career Services does not track -- keep in mind that on-campus recruiting is an expensive endeavor. If employers aren't planning to hire, they are not going to come.

That doesn't mean there won't be changes in Penn's employment patterns. There will be. But 1991-1992 also sheds light on that.

Most Penn students in 1991 received two job offers at maximum -- not the handful of choices that prevailed during the late 1990s. More offers came in the spring -- not during the late fall, the time period when a majority of seniors had typically received them over the past few years.

And unlike the huge salary gains and even larger bonuses in recent years, salary increases in 1991 were small -- about 1 percent -- while year-end bonuses were dramatically smaller.

Of course, the numbers don't tell the whole story -- a large part depends on student motivation. This year's graduates will have to be a lot more creative and persistent if they are going to succeed. They'll have to forgo PennTrak in favor of phone calls and paper resumes. They may even have to accept slightly less in the way of salary or prestige.

To hear a lot of current Penn seniors speak, there's a much stronger sense of entitlement than actual initiative. But in the new New Economy, it may be the old fashioned career search that lands the right job.

Eric Dash is a senior Management and American History major from Pittsburgh, Pa.

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