<p>There has been lots of media coverage lately about students at elite schools having a hard time getting jobs. The NYT had a story this weekend about Wharton students being shocked at lack of offers. </p>
<p>Do kids who’ve always been successful take this rejection harder?</p>
<p>This is a great reason for kids to grow up with performing arts experience. Audition a lot and you WILL become proficient at learning to cope with failure!</p>
<p>“Senior Olga Tymejczyk arrived at the seminar early. With just a month and a half until graduation, Tymejczyk has applied for 10 jobs, but has no offers.”</p>
<p>A seminar on handling rejection? Oh my. Isn’t that a bit much? It’s a sign, I think, of how much these kids have been coddled.
That said, I do recognize that these kids must deal with folks who think anyone who goes to Harvard can get anything they want. That’s probably the hardest part. The clueless aunt who say “Hey, what’s wrong with you? You go to Harvard right? It should be easy for you to find a job.”</p>
<p>I don’t think that coddled is the correct term. When these students and others started college, they expected jobs when they graduate. Not many factored in the possibility for the dearth of jobs we see today. Its no different than when I graduated in the early 70’s.</p>
<p>I also graduated in the 70’s but my expectations were pretty low. Yes, the economy was horrible. I started out in a temp job and worked myself up.
I stick to “coddled”. I believe I read that term first from a Harvard professor in the Chronicle-(OUR CODDLED STUDENTS, How Harvard Compromised Its Virtue). Here’s an excerpt of what he wrote back in 2003. I think it still applies…especially to these “rejection seminars”
“Harvard should respect the self-confidence of its students and not pay so much attention to their anxieties. If it did, it would cease to be such a trendy place. It would regain its own confidence, sometimes misnamed arrogance, and re-establish its right to leadership in American education.”
Harvey C. Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard University.</p>
<p>Our SAT tutor is a an unemployed Harvard Grad. Actually just significantly underemployed as people around here aren’t even spending on tutoring they way they use to.</p>
<p>It was the same for those of us who graduated in the early 80’s. Maybe these schools should be explaining economic cycles. </p>
<p>And BC, if Harvard and Wharton kid’s are having a hard time just imagine the kids down the school food chain. I think this is easier for kid’s who have parent’s who understand the economy and hardest on kid’s without this background who thought college guaranteed a good job immediately.</p>
<p>Our oldest son, who is graduating from Cornell in May, says that he knows all kinds of kids without job offers, good students who have applied to a wide variety of positions. Other kids have taken what they can get, including low-paying internships.</p>
<p>We have only seen the first wave of this recession. Who knows how many businesses and even industries are teetering? Many people are going to struggle economically for a number of years.</p>
<p>I recruit college grads for the construction industry, where for the last 7-8 years almost all the CM programs at colleges had nearly 100% placement. Those kids’ expectations of employment are no different than Harvard kids, and they generally aren’t the coddled type, but go to State U’s. </p>
<p>Regardless whether it’s an Ivy education or engineering or years of good experience, a recession is painful. Most of these kids have never known anything like this, but neither have I. </p>
<p>It seems a little harsh to label a student who has worked hard to get into Harvard, then worked hard there, as “coddled” because they’re disappointed they can’t find a job.</p>
<p>“And BC, if Harvard and Wharton kid’s are having a hard time just imagine the kids down the school food chain. I think this is easier for kid’s who have parent’s who understand the economy and hardest on kid’s without this background who thought college guaranteed a good job immediately.”</p>
<p>I taught our kids about how hard it is to make a buck when they were early teenagers: about gold, currencies, energy prices and stocks. Son almost has too many jobs at the moment and I’m a bit worried that he has too much on his plate. He’s always been taught to think conservatively when it comes to money and considers himself fortunate when money or a job falls into his lap.</p>
<p>We have two or three openings for engineers in my group (two left recently and the third is an open requisition). I just heard that we lost another engineer to a small company in another group so I expect an opening in that group too. This is in Massachusetts where things are pretty sour overall in the unemployment picture.</p>
<p>I went to BC for a year and was recruited by a headhunter after one year in college. They got my name from another student that they had recruited. I worked for a medium-sized manufacturing firm and learned the ropes on a variety of accounting, business and manufacturing systems. My grades were awful that year outside of my programming classes. This was 1979 or 1980 - a really bad time for graduates. I really didn’t have a clue about how bad the economy was until I saw BC grads working in the local supermarkets bagging groceries. I’ve been working since I was 11 (no child-labor laws back then) and really didn’t consider life without working a job regularly.</p>
<p>Professions have their upturns and downturns. I remember when SOX spurred on the great accounting boom earlier in this decade. The IB boom. The construction boom. Retail management going nuts. CS crashed in 2000-2001. High-school seniors thought that jobs would all be outsourced, it was a tough major without a lot of monetary rewards and that tech would take a long time to come back. It did eventually come back but we didn’t produce the domestic grads that companies needed.</p>
<p>My experience has been that friends kids from the Ivy and Ivy-like schools have been slower to accept lower paying, less prestigious jobs, and the resume blizt it takes to even find those jobs than the kids at the state schools. </p>
<p>Recessions are difficult for everyone. It’s a tough lesson to learn so young.</p>
<p>Yes, we see many posts on these forums from kids who have unrealistic expectations for compensation right out of college. This was happening before the recession. My parents had a hard time dealing with my starting salary in the 70s out of what was an expensive school for the time. These kids will temper their expectations, bite the bullet and take what they can get and over time they will advance their salaries if they have the goods…just the same as the public school kids. 10 application really is a sad statement. My teen applied at more than 10 places in one month for a part-time minimum wage job. These college grads are going to have to put much more effort into the search! I will never be convinced that as a whole kids in public school are “further down the food chain” and therefore have a more difficult time. Really, I believe that the game starts completely over so I, too, found humor in the Globe article.</p>
<p>My friend hires for a large state government agency. She used to hire lots of kids from the Ivies and other selective schools for computer, budgeting, and office positions in the $40-45,000 range. The experience and political contacts were a good launching pad for those looking to work for the government. After having to deal with “I’m graduated from HYP, have so and so do that (meaning grunt work)” my friend will no longer even interview a HYP kid who has no job experience. It could be fast-food, work-study, telemarketing or anything else. But if they have never had a job she won’t even interview them. She still looks at the State U kids with no experience, but most have worked somewhere at sometime.</p>