Yes, great jobs right off the bat are not guaranteed. My husband and I got our master’s degrees in engineering, and we made top grades. But when we got out of school, the economy was in a slump. We sent out 271 resumes (“We are a newly married couple looking for work as structural engineers in the [blank] area…”). We received only a handful of responses. A company in Maine finally responded and ended up hiring both of us. Our starting salaries were certainly not as high as we expected them to be! It was a humbling experience, for sure. We thought we would be fairly well off, and we weren’t! We had very little college debt. If we’d had a big monthly payment, we wouldn’t have been able to buy a house for quite awhile.