Bellboys with B.A.s

By John Greenwald

Ross Perot may have lost his big debate with Al Gore last week, but the blustery billionaire did make one telling point: recent college graduates have been having a tougher time finding a good job since 1992 than at any other time in the past 20 years. Irritated by Gore's upbeat description of the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Perot blurted out, "If this is all true, why is it that everywhere I go in a hotel, I've got a college graduate coming up to the room bringing food, carrying bags and so on and so forth, waiting until they get their job?"

The bellboy-B.A. phenomenon should surprise no one at a time when countless corporations continue to downsize. According to a Labor Department study released last year, 30% of each new crop of graduates between now and 2005 will march straight into the ranks of the jobless or the underemployed. That would represent a hefty -- and dispiriting -- increase over the 1984-90 period, when an average of 20% of each graduating class promptly became "underutilized."

To make matters worse, the twentysomething graduates entering the workplace stand to earn less in inflation-adjusted dollars than their boomer counterparts did a generation ago. Starting pay for new liberal-arts graduates now averages $27,700 a year, according to a Northwestern University annual survey; that falls short of the adjusted entry-level earnings of $28,500 in 1968.

The bleak employment outlook has created a jam at college placement offices, where new graduates vie with unemployed older ones for the few available jobs. "We're seeing a lot more of our graduates from a year ago coming into our office and competing with the current graduates," says Jean Hernandez, director of the University of Washington career center. At the same time, she adds, "students are more anxious than they were four years ago. In checking resumes, I see more students looking for work outside their majors and more who are doing jobs that don't require college degrees."

Even graduates of top schools have found the job market unwelcoming. After receiving a 1992 bachelor's degree in history from Williams College in Massachusetts, Randolph Scully spent a year scouring the Washington area, "hoping to do something remotely related to what I was interested in." No luck. After a frustrating year in a succession of temporary paralegal positions, Scully has returned to school to study for a Ph.D. in history. "Your education prepares you to expect certain things when you leave," he recalls with a touch of bitterness, "and then you go out there and find out it's not the case."

Other job seekers have had the good fortune to find what they were looking for in a job market that seems to grow more crowded by the day. Joseph Clough landed an accounting position last December after receiving a degree in the subject from Virginia's Lynchburg College the previous May. Clough's search began in school and later took him to New York State, where he clerked in a convenience store while sending out resumes. When nothing turned up, he returned to his parents' house in Lynchburg, Virginia, only to have the pizza parlor where he had worked in college reject him as overqualified. That's when the offer from a small Reston, Virginia, accounting firm came through. But Clough's big break meant big disappointment for others: no fewer than 250 people had applied for his job.

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON