Caps and Groans for Job-Seeking Graduates : Education: Class of '94 is pessimistic about finding employment even though prospects are on the upswing.

By RALPH FRAMMOLINO

June 12, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Although jobs are somewhat more plentiful, Tom Luu--a 22-year-old economics major at UCLA--has a bad case of the graduation blues.

More than $8,000 in debt and with a string of job rejection letters to his name, Luu is so bummed out about graduating next weekend that he does not want to invite his parents down from the Bay Area for commencement exercises.

“It’s been hard . . . with the rejection letters coming in,” Luu said. “At first, you don’t take it personally but after a while it’s hard not to. Sometimes, I feel like I’m lost.”

Luu is not alone. Despite an uptick in the economy and hopeful stirrings by employers, many in the Class of 1994 are approaching graduation with no little dread.

Those who plunge into the changing market are steeling themselves with a toughened view of reality for the arduous job search ahead. Others have opted for graduate school to enhance their marketability, while some deal with the anxiety by taking temporary jobs, traveling or taking their time to find employment.

“I haven’t started the job hunt as yet--I just couldn’t deal with it,” said Stanford University economics major Susie Hassan, 22, who plans to look for employment after today’s commencement.

“It’s a pretty big time commitment and I made a conscious decision not to do it right now,” she said. “I realize that I’ve probably let some opportunities pass by, but there’s always next year.”

Even during good economic times, graduating classes suffer a postpartum depression of sorts when they leave the comfortable university environment, said Patrick Scheetz, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University.

But this year’s class--subjected to four years of doom and gloom dispatches about corporate layoffs, vanishing professional opportunities and a decline in the standard of living--is definitely in a much deeper funk, he said.

“There’s a very lackadaisical attitude among the graduates this year,” Scheetz said. “This is a group of students who came through college expecting that tomorrow is going to be worse than yesterday. The market is turning around and they don’t know how to handle this.”

The good news, Scheetz and other placement officials say, is that employers will hire 1.1% more graduates this year; there has been a surge of firms seeking pre-graduation interviews at Stanford, USC and other California campuses.

At UCLA, firms booked 12,000 half-hour job interview slots this spring--more than the average of 10,000 slots that employers sought before the recession, said Tina Oakland, assistant director of placement and career planning at the Westwood school. She said the increase means companies will be offering a bumper crop of professional, full-time jobs.

So why are seniors so downcast? “It sometimes takes longer to get the word out to students, to have that optimism filter down to them,” she said.

Still, the jobs offered this year will be down more than 30% from pre-recession levels. And others say the jobs awaiting this year’s graduates include a larger share of part-time, temporary, sales-related or commission work than in the past.

“If you conduct an analytical look of who the employers were that were coming, there was a strong tilt toward sales and marketing kinds of occupations, and it was harder to find the high-paying, high-powered jobs that used to be associated with the defense industry and . . . biotechnology,” said Neil Murray, whose career center at UC San Diego saw 114 companies conduct a record 1,000-plus interviews for entry-level jobs this year.

The significance of this global economic shift is not lost on this year’s class, which is also under pressure as a new generation of graduates continues to redefine what work means, said Arthur Levine, a Harvard University education professor who has conducted a massive graduate survey.

“I’m finding a generation torn between two things--doing well and doing good,” Levine said. “On one hand, this is a generation that’s decided it doesn’t want to be Donald Trump or Ivan Boesky. But on the other hand, they’ve decided that the thought of being Mother Teresa isn’t all that appealing, either.”

The results of Levine’s research--which compares the graduating classes of 1993 and 1978--found that the generation shaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Challenger explosion and the Rodney G. King beating is less selfish and more optimistic about society as a whole than were the children of Watergate, the Arab oil embargo and the civil rights movement.

But he also found that today’s graduates are a cynical, scared bunch too.

“The questions they always ask when you get to the focus groups are: ‘Is there going to be a future for me? Are jobs going to be available?’ ” he said.

Campus mental health officials say that these worries are stressing out many college students, possibly contributing to the sharp increase in depression and other psychological ills over the last several years.

The number of psychological emergencies has jumped 54% in the last 10 years on campuses of 10,000 students or more, according to a recent University of Maryland survey of 250 counseling centers. On smaller campuses, emergency calls have jumped 26%.

Although there is no way to prove what’s causing this, “some of the depression is anticipatory” as students move closer to graduation and to the reality of fighting for jobs and making less than their parents, said Teresa Branch, president of the Assn. of University and College Counseling Center Directors.

The palpable Angst provided grist for a series of “Doonesbury” comic strips last month lampooning the value of a college degree. In one panel, graduates in robes and mortarboards react to the mention of the employer of choice by shouting “Gap! Gap! Gap!”

In his address to UCLA students last month, President Clinton chuckled at the comic strip’s dark humor and characterized it as inaccurate.

However, a series of random campus interviews paints a much bleaker picture, especially for liberal arts graduates such as Aaron Wilkes, 25, who graduated cum laude from USC with a bachelor’s degree in political science.

After the May 8 ceremony, Wilkes--married with a 17-month-old son--began jotting down his thoughts on the graduation program. “I wrote that I felt skepticism,” said Wilkes, who has been accepted to law school. “I felt kind of like, ‘Was it worth it? Is (the degree) going to lead me anywhere?’ ”

Jay San-Martin, a finance senior and Cal State Long Beach student body president, said he knows students who are going on to grad school, either to put off repaying student loans or because they believe a bachelor’s degree is not enough these days.

“There is the general feeling that, ‘Damn, now that I’ve gotten here, the goal seems to be pushed away one step further,’ ” he said. “It’s like a carrot in front of the mule.”

Darby Ann Morrisroe, a senior in political science at UC Davis and the system’s student regent, is just as glum. “Most of my peers are not looking forward to graduation at all because they have to move back home.

“That’s really the only option for a significant number of my friends,” said Morrisroe, who is seeking a legislative internship in Sacramento before going to graduate school. “There are no jobs. Absolutely no jobs. Except for retail positions or waitressing.”

Stanford economics major Lawrence Baeck, 21, decided not to delay his quest to land a job as a management consultant or investment banker. Thirty first-round job interviews later, his reward was a solitary offer--from Ernst & Young, where he interned last year.

“I didn’t think it would be this tough,” he said. “I thought I was pretty damn qualified with a Stanford diploma and rather good grades.”

He is one of the lucky ones. Luu and his UCLA roommate, economics major Edmund Velasquez, have invented a game to poke fun at their as-yet futile searches for jobs. When either receives what looks like a rejection letter in the mail, he throws the envelope up in the air to watch it float. The object: Guess how many pages of bad news are inside.

“I go into my interviews now with a pessimistic attitude because you don’t fall so hard,” said Velasquez, who skipped Clinton’s upbeat speech at UCLA because he was interviewing to be a store manager for Target.

He did not get the job.

Contributing to this story were Times campus correspondents Laura A. Galloway at USC, Marina Dundjerski at UCLA and Rajiv Chandrasekaran at Stanford.