Bleak job market awaits Hawai'i college graduates

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

The future looks grim for Hawai'i college students who are preparing to graduate and enter one of the most unforgiving job markets in years.

Stephanie Luu, a senior in electrical engineering at the University of Hawai'i, discusses job opportunities with Raytheon interviewer Bill Otoide. Hawai'i's job market looks bleak for many new graduates. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

And many major local employers, hit hard by the downturn in tourism and the economy after the Sept. 11 attacks, have canceled their college recruiting plans.

"We just don't have the volume of positions open to justify attending," said Jim Austin, director of public relations for Outrigger Hotels & Resorts.

The tight job market in Hawai'i reflects the scene across America. Businesses expect to hire 20 percent fewer college graduates than last year, according to research by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Unemployment rates have shot up for both college graduates and 20- to 24-year-olds.

The number of students staying in college has increased by 400,000 since last year. And of the 5.5 million college students looking for work in the first three months of the year, unemployment has risen to 7.5 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's bureau of labor statistics.

Hawai'i's Labor Department does not track unemployment statistics by demographics, but the state's unemployment rate for all ages was 4.7 percent in February. While that was down from a two-year high of 5.5 percent in November, it is still well above the 3.6 percent rate early last year.

It all adds up to significant challenges for the newest crop of wannabe workers.

At Chaminade University, five of the 40 companies scheduled for a March job fair pulled out.

"IBM usually brings a staff of four or five recruiters," said Susan Morita, the director of Chaminade's career services. "Even if they don't have vacant positions, they still come out to talk to the students. This year, they didn't come at all."

Even internships are mostly offered with no pay.

"Whew," Morita said. "It's tough."

Times have changed

The tight job market is a dramatic change for this year's graduating seniors compared with their prospects when they entered college four years ago, said Tom Dev-lin, director of the career center at the University of California-Berkeley.

"The last five years were the greatest economic opportunity for college graduates in the last 20, 30 years," Devlin said. "Now there's no question that the economy has impacted all students, from freshmen to the Ph.D level, whether we're talking about part-time employment, internships in the summer or full-time employment."

Larson Kiyabu is typical of the kind of Hawai'i student showing up at job fairs and college career centers these days.

Kiyabu, 27 of Kahalu'u, is a Hawai'i Pacific University graduate student who has been to so many job fairs that he can't remember them all, and said he has filled out an estimated 70 job applications in the past four years. He has applied for sales jobs, advertising, even work as an entertainer.

None of them ended up in a job offer.

Like other college students nationwide, Kiyabu has stayed in school and is pursuing his master's in business administration. He said he dreams of marketing after-market car parts. But he took an unpaid internship in the Sheraton Waikiki's catering department for a year to get experience. He pays the bills by selling electronics at Sears.

"I'm doing some jobs that others would not take," Kiyabu said. "But I felt that if I do it and do my best, I could build the basic, but necessary, skills for marketing."

And that's the message that employers and campus career centers are trying to send.

Karin Ash, director of career services at Cornell University in New York, organized a panel discussion in February of Cornell graduates who faced similar bleak times after they graduated in the early 1990s.

Flexibility a must

The four panelists told a packed auditorium of students that they need to be flexible and consider unpaid internships and jobs outside their fields. By the time they returned to Cornell in February, "None of them were in the job they had when they left school," Ash said. "They had had multiple jobs and most of them had actually changed careers."

Ash has been aggressively marketing Cornell graduates since the economy turned sour. Her office developed a brochure offering to connect small and medium-sized companies and nonprofit organizations with Cornell students through telephone and video interviews, the internet and résumé services.

So far, Cornell has sent 5,000 brochures and is working on identifying another 5,000 organizations nationwide.

Devlin at UC Berkeley tries to stay on top of statistics and trends that measure the job market for college graduates. But all he has to do is walk around to tell how the economy is affecting them.

"Take a look at the coffee shops," Devlin said, "and look at the age of the people hanging around during the day."

To be sure, there still are industries that are hiring, including government, services, healthcare and retail. As the economy and industries such as airlines regain strength, experts also expect more jobs to slowly become available.

But experts say job seekers likely won't face a flush market again until companies see a full economic recovery take hold — and that might not be until the end of the year, or early next.

Companies reluctant

At Hawai'i Pacific University, the uncertain economy was reflected in the campus' March job fair, which usually attracts about 80 employers. This year it was moved to a smaller site, so the university could accommodate only about 60 employers, and had to turn others away.

Lianne Maeda, director of the university's career services center, said the university still saw a general reluctance by Mainland employers to come to Hawai'i to recruit.

The same recruiting trends can be seen at University of Hawai'i-Hilo and Brigham Young University-Hawai'i.

Norman Stahl, UH-Hilo director of career services, said expectations were that fewer employers would show up for the university's March 12 job fair.

While the number of employers actually increased from 39 last year to 45 this year, one company on O'ahu and another in Hilo canceled their plans a few days before the fair.

"They just said we have changed our anticipated staffing requirements," Stahl said. "It sounds to me like they decided not to recruit for the positions."

Officials at BYU-Hawai'i's student development center decided to move their job fair away from March, when most of the Mainland and international recruiters can visit the Hawai'i campuses in the same week.

The theory was that more BYU-Hawai'i alumni would come back for homecoming in February and could widen the job net for students.

Instead, the number of recruiters fell by 10 to 15 percent and many students stayed away as well, said Amos Jordan, who assists the director of placement.

Now BYU-Hawai'i officials said they are rethinking what to do about future job fairs given "that the entire student world is aware of the paucity of jobs," Jordan said.

"Clearly we're considering moving our job fair back to coincide with the others," Jordan said. "That's still under discussion."

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8085.