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The shortage of positions has depressed most salaries. This spring the pay for even highly prized computer scientists is up only about 1% from 1982, to $23,172. Accountants are averaging $18,700, also a rise of only 1% over last year. Beginning lawyers may be getting a hefty $38,800 on Wall Street, but masters in business administration are averaging $23,232, down 9% from last year. Given the realities of the job market, even advanced degrees do not help students drive much of a bargain. Says Judith Kayser of the College Placement Council: "Students are accepting offers almost as soon as they're made. There's a lot of talent out there that can be hired at very reasonable rates."
Liberal arts students face the bleakest prospects of all. According to the College Placement Council, their average starting salaries are down 7% from 1982 levels, to $14,256. Counselors predict that many liberal arts students without specific talents or experience must brace themselves for a long and frustrating search for suitable work, and may initially have to accept lowpaying, low-prestige jobs. Worst off are students with an academic average of 2.5 (C+) or below; many companies will not even interview seniors with anything less than 3.5.
With an eye on the market, many schools are counseling their liberal arts majors to consider imaginative uses for their degrees. Boston College's placement office suggests that history majors consider applying their research and analytical skills to jobs as far afield as the Border Patrol. Drexel University in Philadelphia requires liberal arts majors to take an accounting and computer science course. Still, there are a few encouraging signs that prospects for liberal arts students may be improving. Says Lindquist: "Corporations need to have good communications skills and some analytical skills. They're finding that they can get better kids in their management training programs from among liberal arts than from such programs as business administration."
Anticipating hard times, some liberal arts students switched majors or took technical courses to improve their prospects. Deborah Hilibrand, 21, a senior at Penn's Wharton School of business, started as a liberal arts major but changed to marketing. The recipient of four job offers, she says: "Transferring was the best thing I ever did." Others were not so lucky. Sue Smith, 22, a senior at Drexel, switched her major from biology to chemical engineering two years ago when she discovered the high salaries that engineers were commanding. Her timing was bad: others rushed into chemical engineering just when the synfuel and plastics industries were cutting back. Smith has no job.