Will There Be Jobs For The Class Of 2010?

Author: Katy Finneran

While campus recruitment should rise again, the market for college grads is a very mixed bag.
 
For college students graduating next spring, there's good news (and bad) on the job front.

Worst things first. According to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), company recruiters plan to visit 6.6% fewer campuses and hire 6.9% fewer graduates than last year. So say 220 relatively large (average size: 7,000 employees) corporations, including General Electric ( GE - news - people ), Wells Fargo ( WFC - news - people ), Ford Motor ( F - news - people ), Macy's ( M - news - people ) and Halliburton ( HAL - news - people ).

Now for the better news: Most job offers will probably be solid. The class of 2009 got a rotten deal, when recruiters showed up at 19.4% fewer campuses and hired 21.7% fewer college grads than they did in the previous academic year. Additionally, NACE respondents said they rescinded 9% of all offers.

Next year should be quite a bit better. The take-back rate could be as low as 1%, guesses Edwin Koc, director of strategic and foundation research at NACE--which puts it in the range of most ''normal'' years. ''This year expectations are much lower and the overall economy is improving,'' Koc explains. ''If anything, I expect maybe a bit better outcome at the end of the period than what we start with.''

Jeff Rice, executive director of career management for the Fisher school of Business at Ohio State University, agrees. ''I do think that companies are more cautious in their hiring positions and not making offers unless they can stand by them,'' he says. Rice goes one step further: He's seen a 35% increase in on-campus recruiters from last year.

So where are the jobs? NACE reports that 20-plus percent of employers say they'll probably do less traveling and more stay-at-home recruiting. That should translate into more regional hiring. ''They're going to be more targeted in the career fairs and colleges they visit,'' says Koc, adding that many employers will fall back on ''the previous success they've had at [a particular] school.''

Regional opportunities are all over the map, so to speak. The West offers the grimmest prospects. Four in 10 companies in that part of the U.S. say they will hire fewer college students. It's pretty awful in the Southeast, too, where companies project a 9.9% drop in jobs offered to new grads. There's a mixed picture in the Midwest, where 14.3% of employers say they intend to increase hiring, while 35.7% plan a decrease (total projected college hiring in the Midwest will fall by 3.2%).

The most hopeful front is the Northeast, where 17.6% of companies say they will increase their hiring of 2010 college graduates; total employment of this group, they expect, will rise by more than 5.6%. ''The biggest reason for the somewhat better outlook in the Northeast is that financial firms are indicating an interest in college hiring again this year,'' says Koc. "The other is that federal government agencies are one of the only sources of growth in hiring over the past two years, and we locate those agencies in the Northeast.''

Unsurprisingly, federal, state and local governments--some of them huge recipients of stimulus tax dollars--will be the biggest potential employers. Indeed, 38.5% of government employers reported projected increase in college hiring. Close behind, 33.3% of trade industry employers--consisting mainly of the broad categories of wholesalers and retailers--think they'll be filling more jobs. ''I think people need to be paying attention to where stimulus money is directed: government, health care, education and energy,'' says Ohio State's Rice.

While many of these sectors are concentrated in the Northeast, there are also biotech industries in California and solar and wind companies in the Southeast and Midwest. Rice also reckons there will be opportunities in consulting and accounting. We have chronic cost-cutting, mostly, to thank for that.

Everything, of course, depends on a generally upward GDP. ''There are indications the economy is improving,'' says Koc. ''But traditionally it takes six months of profitability before companies pick up for hiring.''