BEYOND COLLEGE
A step into the real world
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
VOL. LXIV
NO. 82
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA MONDAY, MARCH 6, 1972
By RICHARD SIMON Staff Writer
Over 800,000 students will graduate from college this June and enter the outside world. Thousands of B.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, including many magna cum laudes, will find to their sorrow that a diploma is no guarantee of a suitable job.
Like the dollar, the diploma seems to have been devalued. A 1970-71 career opportunity survey shows that job offers for male B.A.’s dropped 61% and a staggering 78% for Ph.D.’s. A University of Wisconsin poll showed that of the 944 men who graduated from the letters and sciences division, only half had the kind of job they wanted.
Meanwhile, a standard joke on college campuses throughout the country is that after graduation you can either work for the local Yellow Cab company or join the campus security force.
For many of the nation’s college graduates without a
job, the joke doesn’t seem too funny.
About half of the graduates go into business. But with the recent recession, unemployment crisis and economic problems, manufacturers were the first to cut back on college recruiting.
The businesses that have been hiring the most students are accounting firms, insurance companies, public utilities and oil. American Telephone and Telegraph hired about 3,500 graduates last year; the accounting firm of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Co. claims they hired more than 1,000 for its 105 offices throughout the country; and the Prudential Insurance Co. and General Motors recruited 500 graduates last year.
Qualified graduates have been successful in finding employment in banking, construction, building-materials manufacturing and retailing.
The aerospace industry, according to Business Week,
''OMORTUNITIES
2HI O’MRTUNITiES 2M*|«M|RTUaiTlKI lMtlMMTUIITIU 'N
ei-«« c*l
PURCHASING CLERK
COLLECTION MANAGE* ASSISTANT
CONTROLLER flrlfc
<rfn »'f * Mmm! (file iwc ___rww»wiJhr *♦*•-».um	il y
• Deliv«
mmmi u;n rwmtm «Nn »i v t* Prt*. a M'i i>wv« pmtiK
w»l	eewrtun.ry t» *n	(*r M Ht'kilw	u>#v.	w*h
WM >*» «•!>« k*outr*<Mi	¥	wfl'MM tn •« • • t	act
ctllMnan mr f«,,n	kuMfb onM«.	tvitunn t
went	o**tr»ct» Som# tr*	rxcev	du*n
H S1AJ09 toc*n«iv«i
•wnuemw
Hi tiims
\
S«o4 Mr I comoinr M>m f •»*♦•€*	7744\*\.
FIDELITY BANK
CLERK INVOICE
C«n*ic**d	_
fed*	rr+rn Si)»ry MfHr
r>«n	for	«irl.	Flos
fo0 bwwf.ti. Frr* oi'Vtnf v *H OK	0r»»arv. iH
B ttcMf >t., LA-________________
lEKk iMkkHMr. D—>fmim~l»» M'	flfwrn	dna
A P M.,
Lft< Typm # Wpm •w--o^a nss Good appfy.
UNIVA______________
t«m #r nor CfU c«iiKt—
Mr	(ir	20 MM
UNIVAC_
f
* Spemr Km Cin __	Operator
TTTPSI1
EI«C. •x.lHt. VMM >0* f API, C*
MISSION CC
DTKDITIT “
Since the country contracted economic problems, college graduates have encountered difficulties in finding jobs. Unemployed Ph.D.’s continuously thumb through the want ads seeking jobs and often accept such minor tasks as driving taxi cabs and pumping gas. This special issue of the Daily Trojan is devoted to analyzing the different aspects of job opportunities and career endeavors of college graduates.
Law seen as field with most opportunities
By GUNTHER MERLI Staff Writer
According to placement directors, the hardest thing about getting a job as a lawyer these days is getting into law school in the first place. There were about 2400 applicants for the 150 places at the Law Center last year, a spectacular rise from 600 applicants in 1968. And this year applications are coming in at an even faster clip.
“Students realize that the way to change the law is through the law,” said Paulette Greenberg, placement director at the Law Center, in explaining law’s popularity.
Greenberg and her counterparts at UCLA and Loyola agree that there are enough jobs for law grads to go around. “We don’t have as many seekers as job opportunities,” she said. The jobs are there, provided the graduate passes the state bar exam, thus qualifying to practice law in California.
This year’s has been described as a buyer’s market—meaning that there are fewer jobs, so that many law grads must take what they can get. In 1969, called a peak period by UCLA’s placement director, the opposite was true: grads could pick and choose and usually received several job offers.
For example, most government agencies, such as the County Counsel and Public Defenders, which usually hold campus interviews, have not done so this year and are not hiring. Government cutbacks are a reflection of the economy as a whole, and the lower hiring rate has hurt the campus placement offices. They maintain, however, that by working at it they are keeping opportunities ahead of demand.
Recent graduates who have found legal work tell a slightly different story. One 1971 grad, now with a large law firm’s Orange County branch, says friends of his who were “not bad law students are still not doing legal work.” Another, working in a business capacity for Motown Records, says some of his friends are still out pounding the pavement.
Law firms usually interview students in the first semester of their third and final year in law school and line up jobs. Graduates report, however, that half their fellow students did not have jobs by the end of the year in 1971.
One recent grad says of the firms and agencies she went to looking for a job, “Their standard line was :Everything is frozen and we’ll take your name.” She admits, however, that she was flooded with job offers after she passed the Bar exam. Sixty percent ot the Law Center’s graduates passed last August; the rest will have to wait and take the test over again. The Bar exam is the major hurdle for those looking for a job.
is Southern California’s biggest employer and its been the profession hardest hit. In May, 1968, Southern California aerospace giants employed 486,000 workers, about one-third of the nation’s aerospace employment. By May, 1970, jobs were down to 403,000. In July, 1971, the figure dropped below
340.000	and it’s still going down as aerospace students continue to graduate from USC’s engineering school.
Despite the increased concern about ecology, the environmental field has produced few new jobs in business or government; however, there has been a slight increase in jobs for environmental engineers and pollution specialists.
Government has created many openings for college graduates. Last year’s Civil Service exam was administered to over 112,000 students last year. But only about
10.000	will be hired for jobs ranging from narcotics agents to explosive inspectors. While many graduates are reluctant to work for the Defense Department or Internal Revenue Service, some find comfort in the environmental agencies or law
enforcement and safety fields.
Some college graduates aren’t lucky enough to find a job before the Selective Service Bureau hires them, while other incentive and enterprising students start their own business, such as organic food and vitamin stores or the recently successful term paper business.
Last year’s depressed job outlook isn’t necessarily indicative of this year’s graduates’ future.
A survey of 185 business and industrial firms by Frank S. Endicott, director of place-ment at Northwestern University, shows that hiring will be up next year.
The Endicott report said that a probable increase in the employment of graduates with bachelor’s degrees of approximately 11% can be expected in 1972.
“Reports on which this survey is based were received during a period of uncertainty on the part of many business leaders concerning the year ahead. The wage-price freeze had been recently imposed and guidelines for the postfreeze period had not yet been fully developed,” Endicott said.
Ed School unaffected by surplus of teachers
By ELYSE MINTEY
According to the National Education Association, there will be only 115,900 positions open for approximately 234,000 graduates of this country’s education schools. Nationwide, public schools are facing cutbacks in funding, dropping enrollment and trimmed cur-riculums; for which there is no logical explanation.
California has an estimated 15,000 unemployed teachers and the number in the nation is estimated at more than 100,000. A dearth of teachers in the last two decades has suddenly become an oversup-ply primarily bacause of a drop in the birth rate.
“Education used to be sacred,” commented Robert Casey, instructor in education and instructional technology. “But for some reason, it has stopped being so, and we don’t know why,” he said, in reference to the inability to find funds for a once highly valued institution. On the local level, failure of various bond issues and a downswing in enrollment have left public education and its employees in the lurch, questioning their professional significance.
What sort of problems does this situation pose for our School of Education? What success are graduates having in their hunt for jobs? Are they enjoying any advantages by holding a credential from USC?
According to Donald Wilson, Chairman of the Department of Teacher Education, the placement for graduates in 1970 and 1971 from the school’s special education programs was 90%, and 80% from general programs. This means that over 650 of last year’s 768 graduates have jobs in some school district of Southern California.
Those astounding figures seem hardly credible in the face of recent and past events. The Los Angeles City School District has not hired a teacher on a contract basis since July 1,1971. With few outstanding exceptions, there has even been a blanket no-hire order issued by the Board of Education. If new schools open and vacancies appear in existing faculties, they are filled by teachers who have been displaced in on-going lay-offs, by those requesting transfers and by those returning from leave.
The Pasadena school district may have to close three of its schools and enrollment in the Glendale system is dropping.
“We’re in a bind here,” said Robert Green at the Westfield Service Center for the Los Angeles district. “It’s healthy to hire new teachers, there are some excellent ones coming out each year, but with the dropping enrollments and displaced teachers needing jobs, it is just not feasible to offer new contracts.”
Theresa Harris, expert for the LA City Schools’ Personnel Selection Branch, said prospective teachers are being counseled to get into fields where there is and will be a need for instructors. “There is generally a shortage of teachers of mathematics, industrial arts (shop classes), agriculture and musical instruments. But there’s nothing open in social studies or English. I’ve been here since 1964 and we had an overload of social studies and English teachers even then. So, the thing to do is try to fill a need.”
This has been the key to the relative success of USC’s School of Education placement attempts.
While state schools like Cal-State L.A. and UCLA have cut their maximum enrollment in teacher education, stiffened curriculums and channeled their students toward research, USC has not altered its courses or its programs.
Instead of paring teacher education to the bone, sending frightening letters to freshmen.(to scare off all but the fanatically deicated), forcing sophomores to take rigorous tests (which is done at Illinois State), USC has a more positive plan.
As Harris mentioned, programs here are trying to deal first with the areas of need.
Intensive preparation for teaching of bilingual children, “problem" children (including the exceptional child: retarded and gifted), children with reading deficiencies, those in correctional institutions,
(Continued on page 2)