I spoke to two new college graduates recently. Both were stellar students with excellent grades and civic participation. One matriculated in civil engineering. The other graduated pre-law and completed a paralegal course, with a view towards going to law school at night and working as a paralegal (while learning more about his discipline) during the day.

Both were in for a shock. Neither one can even get an interview in their respective fields, much less be offered a position.

Experienced attorneys and engineers I know tell me that work in their fields has greatly diminished over the past year, and that like so many other industries, potential retirees did not retire, due to the great losses to IRA, 401(k) and pension programs. Even large firms and practices greatly downsized due to the rough economic climate of the past 18 months.

So where does this leave the new graduates who are hoping to find work? How do they advance their careers?

Short answer – they don’t. Right now, both of the above mentioned grads are continuing with their college jobs - one in a restaurant and the other in retail - as a means of keeping body and soul together while they pursue better options. Both are rather cheerful, and not disheartened to find that after four or five years of very expensive college, they cannot get a position.

The engineer is considering working for Teach for America, a non-profit that matches teachers with kids in American rural and low income public schools. Math and science professionals are in high demand, so he feels confident he will be accepted if he applies.

According to a recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, this has been the best placement year ever for the Teach for America organizations. More than 4,000 new teachers have signed up for the corps to teach in public schools across the country. The average SAT score of the students applying for these positions was 1344, and their average grade-point average was 3.6. Top people, putting their education to use in fields other than those for which they trained. New teachers are placed in regions across the United States that are considered rural or underserved.

Teach for America is part of AmeriCorps, so these new grads may also be able to negotiate loan forbearance and even loan forgiveness if they are accepted to teach in underserved areas. Given the thousands of dollars in loans the average college grad has to repay, this is no small thing. And in many regions, the program has partnered with area universities to offer subsidized Masters degree programs in Education for interested participants.

How it Impacts Health Care
Is this where our health care professionals will go? How will we get them back into acute and long term care when we need them in a few years? So many will be on to other career paths and out of the running to serve the elderly and ill populations who need them.

It happened in the 80s and it is happening again. Those valuable, hard won placements in schools of nursing, PT and Pharmacy will not pay off in wonderful new graduates stepping into waiting jobs. Instead, those would-be RNs, PTs and Pharmacists will meander into other areas of work – perhaps unrelated to their original fields of study – and be lost forever to the health care workforce.

And although we are in pretty good shape at present, I still shudder when I look back at those BLS projections for 2015 and beyond. We will have a shortage of epic proportions. Few organizations take on true workforce planning, and many will be caught unawares when that tidal wave rolls in.

Recruitment, anyone?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 3:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.