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Some do not want a job at all. Others are much more interested in working toward a career that fulfills rather than pays. In any case, their new values keep them from suffering as much anguish as previous generations would have endured in a similar situation. "In the '50s and early '60s, most students' faith in careerism was nearly as tenacious as their faith in the American dream," says Edward Dreyfus, a counselor at U.C.L.A. "Today, undergraduates tend to view a job as only part of their total person. Their identity is not going to be contingent upon their employment."
Watery Clam Chowder
The seniors who most need the New Consciousness are the B.A.s in the humanities. And they constitute about three-fourths of the graduating class. Says William Balfour, vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Kansas: "We'll find some of them behind lunch counters, digging ditches or learning trades." The number of openings in elementary and secondary school is falling off, and companies are interested in specialists not generalists. As a result, liberal arts seniors are the most be wildered of the graduates. According to John Berry, a senior at Wisconsin's Beloit College, "The standard joke is that after you graduate you can either work for Yellow Cab in town or for the security force on campus. My father kept saying that with a B.A. the world was my oyster. I find that it's more like a watery clam chowder." Echoes Steve Ukman of the University of Kansas: "A whole generation of humanists is coming out of school, and who wants them?"
New Militants
Black graduates, at the moment, are proportionately having less trouble than whites. Job offers are down, but by only 10% says the director of a place ment service for 60 Negro colleges. More important, though, the opportunities are wider. The proportion of blacks going into teaching has dropped from 80% to 46%, while the number going into business administration is rising as more and more corporations seek to acquire an integrated image. The rare black Ph.D. this year can command a salary $4,000 or so higher than a white with the same training.
Women, the other new militants, are not faring nearly so well in the slack job market. A few companies have made special efforts to hire them in management jobs, but as one corporation recruiter put it: "Blacks are still on the upswing, but women have slowed down.
Prejudice is far more ingrained here than anywhere else on the hiring spectrum." The major problem lies in the fact that there are more and more teachers being trained at a time when the falling birth rate is starting to reduce the elementary-school population. And in their anxiety to find work, more and more men are taking some of the available teaching openings, as well as be coming bank tellers, social workers and telephone operators—all jobs traditionally held by women.
Present Possibilities
Normally, about half of the nation's college graduates go into business, large and small. These days, almost as many go on to graduate study or to schools for law, medicine and the other professions. A much smaller segment of students seek work in Government. Not all the job opportunities are equally promising (see