James Foss, 23, got his bachelor's degree in industrial management from Michigan's Lawrence Institute of Technology last July. He expected to go to work for one of the major automakers, but neither they nor 50 other companies that Foss approached were interested. Then he learned that he could qualify for a typist's job at Michigan Bell Telephone Co. if he could manage 45 words a minute, and today he is studying typing at a community college near Detroit. The $139-a-week job is no sure thing, but Foss is hopeful: "I'm up to 34 words a minute."
Mark Steinberg, 25, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from U.C.L.A. with an M.A. in psychology from Berkeley, subsists on food stamps and lives on unemployment compensation in Venice, Calif. How many responses has he had to the 50 resumes he sent out? "I don't have to guess," he says. "One." He did not get the job.
Howard Felber, 32, is more fortunate.
He is employed—as an office boy for a real estate firm in Lawrence, Kans., picking up trash, gassing up cars, running other errands. Felber used to be a clerk in a liquor store; before that, in 1974, he got a Ph.D. in medieval history from the University of Kansas.
Similar stories can be heard around any campus: the French major who landed an accounting job after a six-month search; the linguistics graduate who drives a cab; the B.A. in marketing who makes $3.50 an hour in a party-favors store; the Ph.D.s who work as stewardesses, fishermen, welders, bank tellers. All bear witness to the death of the deeply ingrained American belief that a college diploma is a semi-automatic passport to a high-paying job and a fulfilling career. As a Wellesley senior puts it, "After college, there is no free lunch."
There especially will be no free lunch for the class of '76, which is graduating when the nation's economy has not fully recovered from its worst slump since the 1930s and many companies are still holding down hiring. According to the College Placement Council, a Bethlehem, Pa., research group, this year's graduates face possibly the worst job outlook ever. Employers are expected to make 5% fewer job offers to recipients of all kinds of degrees than they did even a year ago, when the recession was at its worst. Some other surveys point to a small improvement, but one that leaves the job picture still bleak.
The employment crisis of the well-educated did not begin and will not end with the class of '76. It has only been aggravated, not caused by the recession and its aftermath. The primary cause is a structural problem that almost nobody foresaw a decade ago: the output of the U.S. educational system and the needs of the U.S. economy are badly out of sync.