Next Saturday, 1581 undergraduates, master’s students and Ph.D. candidates will graduate, according to the Office of the Registrar, and begin searching for employment.

The national unemployment rate is currently hovering around 10 percent, and Iowa’s unemployment rate is around 6.2 percent as of October.

While these rates have not yet been seasonally adjusted, it stands to reason that it is harder for a graduate to find a job in this economy than it was three to five years ago.

“One of the reasons our rate is lower is that our economy didn’t boom up like the rest of the economy, and therefore it didn’t crash as much,” said Dave Swenson, associate scientist in the economics. “Another reason is because a lot of people who are young, especially young adults — and even more especially people who are college-educated young adults — leave the state early in their work careers looking for work in other places.”

This exodus of highly educated employment leaves Iowa with a smaller workforce and pool of skilled workers.

But, that doesn’t mean that graduates should stay in Iowa.

“There’s no indication that there’s actually a demand for a big pool of young workers here in Iowa,” Swenson said. “We tend to educate far more skilled people than our economy can consume. Our economy is growing at maybe 30 to 40 percent of the rate of the nation’s, and our population is growing at maybe a quarter of the speed, so we literally export our skilled workers.”

Swenson said some of the reasons students would find it difficult to find work before or directly after graduation are lack of job availability and the growing pool of unemployed workers applying for the jobs.

“So, in the main areas where you have massive amounts of layoffs, somebody who has just graduated from school is at a tremendous disadvantage because they don’t have the experience,” Swenson said.

Peter Orazem, university professor of economics, said data still consistently show that unemployment rates among college graduates are far lower than unemployment rates among people who only graduated from high school.

Despite the difficulty graduates will have getting jobs in a bust economy, Orazem said, it is still worthwhile to have that college degree.

In order for the national economy to keep up with the growing number of workers entering the labor pool, it would have to create 140,000 jobs a month, Swenson said.

“That’s our issue. If there really isn’t a consistent demand for these jobs, and the economy gets to where it needs to be but can’t take care of a natural increase of young people in the labor force, it still won’t lower the unemployment rate, and this could last for four to five years,” Swenson said.

However, Swenson believes the economy will begin to add jobs in mid-to-late 2010.

Larry Hanneman, programming director in the engineering career services office, said there would be a slight decrease in the number of students employed at graduation, but it wouldn’t be as significant as people may think.

“[Engineering] career fair attendance by employers was certainly down this fall versus last year, and student attendance was about the same,” Hanneman said. “We actually saw a downturn in employer participation in career fair’s start in the spring semester. The caveat to that is that last fall was one of the best years in history.”

Hanneman agreed with Swenson’s assessment that Iowa’s economy hadn’t suffered as much as the national economy.

“I would suggest that we here at Iowa State have actually experienced a lesser intensity in the downturn,” Hanneman said.

For fall semester, 4,489 on-campus interviews for engineering, business, liberal arts and sciences, and agriculture have been reported, Hanneman said.

“If you look at the last 10 to 15 years, we average about 8- to 10,000 interviews per year, “ Hanneman said. “So I think we’ll be on track. I feel quite encouraged that we’ve had that number of interviews. Employers invest in sending recruiters here, and it really is a nice statement about what our students have.”

Swenson said one thing graduating students have to keep in mind is the possibility that they will have to start in a different position then they had anticipated.

“You’re not going to have lots of choices. You’re also not going to be able to sort of pick and choose where you think you’re going to work,” Swenson said. “You have to be practical. It may involve actually engaging in sort of interim period internships to demonstrate your usefulness to a firm.”

Hanneman said 70 – 75 percent of career fair employers were recruiting for coops and interns.

Hanneman said 1,111 freshman attended the engineering college career fair this fall.

“The earlier you start, the better,” he said. “We’re probably running 40 – 50 percent interview for coops and interns and the rest is for jobs. Employers are becoming very reliant on students having had cooperative education or internships; it’s very critical.”

Kathy Tsamis, senior in biology, is graduating this month and has found a job doing colon cancer research at Duke University in North Carolina.

Tsamis said she’s had three internships since she started school and has extensive experience doing research.

She said she wasn’t thinking about getting a job when she did the internships, but it helped.

“It most definitely hit me when I started filling out this paperwork for this job and when I found out I was graduating,” Tsamis said. “I thought, ‘I need to find a job’ and I didn’t think I was going to be able to find something that was using my degree.”

Tsamis said she didn’t go through any of the traditional methods of finding a job.

Instead, she focused on networking with people she already knew to find out about new positions.

Kathy Wieland, director of the college of business career services, said a lot of students are having to learn to network when they are hunting for jobs, especially with the economy in its current state.

“In this climate, it’s important to execute a comprehensive job search as opposed to some of the previous years when students might have been able to do one or two things to seek a job and be successful,” Wieland said.

“So, let’s say that I went to a career fair and maybe got a couple of interviews, but then I also had to make some contact with some individuals and professional associations and networking groups. I had to employ other methods.”

Orazem said students who graduate in this economy should take jobs where they can get them.

“There’s a cost to graduating in a weak economy and they’re just going to have to accept that,” he said.

“You have to expect that the job you’re going to get is not going to be as good as the jobs people who graduated three years ago got. But then again, a lot of people who graduated three years ago have lost their jobs. It basically just means that people are going to have to work harder to get jobs.”

Percentage Employment Changes by Sector, October 2008-2009, U.S. and Iowa
	Industry	U.S.	Iowa
1	Total Nonfarm	-4.2%	-2.8%
2	Construction	-15.0%	-12.2%
3	Manufacturing	-11.8%	-10.1%
4	Durable goods	-14.6%	-14.6%
5	Nondurable goods	-7.0%	-3.1%
6	Wholesale trade	-5.4%	-0.4%
7	Retail trade	-3.2%	-1.0%
8	Transportation and warehousing	-6.6%	-5.1%
9	Information	-4.7%	-1.8%
10	Financial activities	-5.5%	0.6%
11	Finance and insurance	-5.4%	0.9%
12	Professional and business services	-6.0%	-6.3%
13	Education and health services	1.9%	2.0%
14	Leisure and hospitality	-3.2%	0.1%
15	Government	-0.3%	-0.2%
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Iowa Workforce Development