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Students with business skills, like those at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., benefited from the uptick in entry-level hiring this year. Bentley University
Students graduating from college in spring 2011 faced an odd sort of serendipity. Of course, there have been better years to enter the job market. But at the start of the year, as many companies determined their entry-level hiring budgets, corporate earnings were strong and the economy showed signs of recovery.
“Hiring picked up in spring. It was pretty fortuitous,” says Robert Conners, who received a bachelor’s degree in finance and business economics from Indiana University Kelley School of Business in May.
Conners signed an employment contract in the fall of his senior year with a firm that wound up liquidating months later, putting him in a rough spot his final semester. But things turned out fine. He graduated with three other job offers and now works in the Oakland (Calif.) office of Compass Lexecon, a consulting firm.
“I thought I would have to scramble because the leftover jobs in spring are usually slim pickings,” Conners says. But as it turned out, he says, “the timing was good.”
As overall job creation continues to sputter, Conners and other class of 2011 undergraduates are benefiting from a window of economic growth that led to the first hiring increase of newly minted bachelor’s degree holders since the class of 2008 entered the workforce. Business students reaped much of the benefit, and accounting jobs made a notable comeback after taking a rare plunge in 2010.
Hiring of new college graduates increased an estimated 10 percent this year after remaining unchanged in 2010, says Philip Gardner, director of research at Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute (CERI). Large companies with 500 or more employees accounted for the bulk of new hires, according to a report published in July by the Society for Human Resource Management, which supports CERI’s estimates.
Hiring of MBAs grew again this year, “but not as much as the bachelor’s [degree] market because there was so much pent-up demand,” Gardner says.
The class of 2011′s success may come at the expense of those who graduated in 2010 and 2009. From Gardner’s research, companies have preferred to make entry-level hires straight from campus instead of the pool of graduates still searching for jobs. The unemployment rate of bachelor’s graduates aged 16 to 24 rose to 13.2 percent in July, up from 11.6 percent a year earlier and 7.6 percent in 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate is almost always highest in June, July, and August as new graduates enter the workforce.
Though the threat of a double-dip recession looms, hiring trends at undergraduate business schools are expected to continue, creating opportunities for 2012 graduates—if they know how to prepare and where to look.
Dustin Earnest received an undergraduate finance degree from the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business in spring 2010. He played varsity football for the school and redshirted his freshman year, intending to put the fifth year of his athletic scholarship toward a graduate degree. Earnest considered an MBA and had an initial interest in engineering programs, but when finance jobs disintegrated in 2008, older classmates urged him to take as many accounting classes as possible. He expects to get a master’s degree in accounting in December.
“I figured it couldn’t hurt to have an extra token on my résumé,” he says, noting that if finance jobs didn’t return he’d have a backup plan. He interned with Goldman Sachs (GS) in Dallas this summer and hopes a full-time offer will follow.
Earnest’s mentality is a legacy of the financial crisis, which made accounting a safer bet than finance for many finance students. Many more now see accounting experience as a way to stand out to financial-services firms, and accounting careers as a potential way to break into finance later if jobs are scarce. At UT-Austin, finance students are voting with their feet: The number of finance majors at McCombs who pursued master’s degrees in accounting nearly tripled from fall 2009 to fall 2010, according to Jim Franklin, director of the graduate accounting program. The figure jumped again based on enrollment for this fall, even as undergraduate finance recruiting picked up during the 2010-11 school year.
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