Monday, March 22, 2010
McClatchy Newspapers
SACRAMENTO, Calif.
Nelson Chiu shook hands with the PepsiCo representative, exchanged a few brief words and received a parting “good luck.”
He was dressed in a crisp, dark blue pinstripe suit on a recent Wednesday, and his voice was starting to fade; he’d been at a career fair inside the University of California-Davis field house since 11 a.m., talked to more than a dozen companies, and it was closing in on 2 p.m. on the afternoon of his daughter’s first birthday.
For Chiu, who earned his MBA in 2009 from UC-Davis’ highly regarded Graduate School of Management, a solid lead would have been a great gift.
For years, someone like Chiu with a newly minted degree from a top-flight business or law school had the closest thing to a golden ticket for a high-paying job. But the ongoing recession has brought graduates — many staggering under mountains of student loan debt — face to face with a new economic reality.
For most of the past decade, markets for both groups of grads were humming: 10 percent to 20 percent growth per year for MBA graduates, according to the nonprofit Graduate Management Admission Council; a 10-year stretch of near-90 percent job placement for law grads, the National Association for Law Placement reported.
But those days seem like ancient history now.
“The biggest challenge is the people who’ve been laid off with the same degree and with a lot more experience,” the 31-year-old Chiu said. “There are too many applicants and not enough career opportunities right now.”
Companies that hired, on average, 12 MBAs in 2008 hired fewer than six in 2009, the GMAC reported.
Nearly 80 percent of employers scaled back on-campus recruiting of MBAs in fall 2009, while nearly half reported a decline in full-time MBA job postings, according to the MBA Career Services Council, which tracks MBA hiring.
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