Covid-19 Is Scrambling the Job Market for Recent Grads. Here’s How Colleges Are Trying to Respond.

As recently as several weeks ago, college seniors might have thought that they were stepping onto one of the best career launchpads in years: an economy that had revved back up from the Great Recession, with jobless rates lower than anytime since 1969.

Then Covid-19 happened, along with travel bans, statewide shutdowns, and millions laid off or furloughed. And with that, the kinds of in-person activities that career centers set up to get graduates on the career path came to an end, too: internships, job shadowing, corporate-recruiting meetings, and lunches with potential future colleagues. As the coronavirus turns spring-break parties and church services into “super spreader” events, the idea of hosting a networking job fair in a college auditorium is unthinkable.

Coronavirus Hits Campus

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

• Here’s Our List of Colleges’ Reopening Models
• Why Is Gettysburg College Giving Up on ‘The Gettysburg Review’?
• Fall-Enrollment Trends in Distance Education: a Snapshot

The rapidly shifting landscape has meant profound changes for all of the participants in the college-to-career pipeline. Colleges’ career counselors have had to adjust their traditional offerings, which tend to be high-touch and delivered in person. Graduates are encountering an even more uncertain road ahead as they also grapple with sobering lessons from the Great Recession. And employers are discovering changes in demand for their industries, too.

So career centers like the one at the University of California at San Diego are trying to figure out how to shift. During last year’s spring break and Christmas holiday, the university sent students throughout California, and as far as Europe and the Pacific Rim, to shadow alumni at their jobs. During spring break this year, the career center connected 500 undergraduates to alumni through videoconferencing.

The new arrangement is not without its limitations, acknowledges Kris Hergert, the center’s executive director. The students miss out on the intimacy that can come only from an all-day, face-to-face encounter, and networking with an alumnus’s work colleagues. But Hergert hopes the videoconferencing can lead to shorter and more frequent check-ins between students and alumni mentors. Developing life skills that can apply in a range of careers is especially important now.

“Life’s all about parallel paths,” Hergert says. Employment, graduate school, entrepreneurship, the military, a gap year — students graduating now might have to rethink the postgraduation path that they intended. “It’s not about the perfect company — that doesn’t exist, and life changes too quickly. It’s about what can I glean that I can apply to wherever I go?”

The shift to online career services has been a scramble in many cases, says Jeremy Podany, who advises career centers through his company, the Career Leadership Collective. “The week of March 9, I think I got 50 emails that Monday saying, ‘How do we do a virtual office? What do we do with this? We have all these events in person, and we don’t know what to do.’”

Ten days later, he says, many institutions were holding events online, offering career counseling through Zoom, and starting to offer bite-size career lessons online.

Changes After the Recession

That responsiveness comes from lessons learned in the Great Recession. Before 2008, Podany says, many colleges had not yet focused on the path from college to career. That gap was exposed as hiring dried up following the market collapse. Suddenly, a degree’s return on investment and an institution’s connections to employers became hugely important to students and parents — and a source of resentment for graduates who felt their alma mater hadn’t helped them launch.

That’s when some colleges began expanding and strengthening their career-counseling offices, putting career programming into orientations, special events, and the curriculum — which helped some institutions attract notice. Andy Chan arrived at Wake Forest University in 2009; by 2013, his work on career development and life design at the university was the feature of a lengthy New York Times article. Colleges also began to abandon a long-held false dichotomy in education: that institutions either are training for curiosity and deep thought, or are merely offering skills for a trade.

The upheaval that’s now roiling the economy may lead to more changes at colleges’ career centers, such as pushing many of their services permanently online, strengthening their relationships with alumni, and encouraging more institutions to closely track the career trajectories of students and to offer assistance to graduates well after they’ve left.

“In this coming year, universities will not be able to use first-job data as a career-success point, right? It’s going to be in the toilet,” Podany says. “They have to look to a broader story about how they help.”

Before anyone had heard of the coronavirus, college presidents often described higher education as a tool to help graduates chart a course in an uncertain future, one in which many of them would be working in jobs that haven’t been invented yet. Covid-19 has only amplified the uncertainty. The pandemic has slowed or shut down companies in many industries: hospitality, travel, retail, and entertainment among them. However, it has also led to a frenzied search for talent in other sectors, starting with health care. Nurses willing to travel to New York City, for example, could earn $10,000 a week, plus lodging, to help hospitals handle the Covid-19 crisis.

Maija Anderson, director of a nursing program at Morgan State University, says that the state of Maryland has put out a call for faculty members, nurses in retirement, and medical students to assist with the response. The emergency has led to some shifts in instruction: Her juniors would normally perform clinical hours in a hospital setting, but the Maryland Board of Nursing and the state’s Department of Education have allowed the university to shift those experiences to simulations.

How the response to the Covid-19 pandemic will affect the pipeline for current and future nursing students remains unclear, she says. While a need will be there, and many students will be excited to work in a crucial field, other students might be frightened at the prospect of having to grapple with a highly infectious and deadly virus.

“This is uncharted territory,” says Anderson, adding that the new nurses and doctors coming out of medical school are likely to suffer some form of posttraumatic-stress disorder. Some students have seemed to pull away from the program, citing concerns.

“We said, We understand, but you have to make a decision,” she says. “I have never seen anything like this before in my life or career, but you can imagine that we’re going to see outbreaks like this, and it’s not going to get any better.” The nursing program has offered to let students take incomplete marks in their clinical courses. So far, no students have decided to drop out, and Anderson has actually seen more interest in the program from freshmen and sophomores.

Help Still Wanted

Some areas of the economy seem to have seen unexpected upticks and opportunities. Handshake, a company that works with career centers to connect students to employers, is conducting surveys to find out which industries are continuing to hire: technology, financial services, government, architecture and construction, and, at the top of the list, curiously, education.

While colleges are feeling a squeeze, says Christine Y. Cruzvergara, vice president for higher education and student success at Handshake, kids and parents are trying to figure out how to continue school lessons at home, and companies and organizations are trying to fit into that space. At the end of March, for example, Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization, put together WideOpenSchool.org to offer lessons online, and put out a call for teachers.

Handshake is surveying employers and students every two weeks to gauge their feelings about and responses to the economic downturn. Slightly more than half of the employers contacted in the most recent edition of the survey said they were still evaluating their hiring plans, while a quarter said that they would make no changes, 10 percent said they would institute some kind of hiring freeze or pause interviews, and 9 percent said they would hire fewer people. Only 4 percent said they would hire more.

Students’ responses indicated some trepidation about the future. Eleven percent had had an offer for a full-time job rescinded, and 30 percent of respondents had had internships rescinded. About a fifth said that employers had “gone dark.” Nearly 60 percent of respondents were considering graduate school. Compared with a survey before the crisis, students indicated more willingness to take gig jobs and part-time jobs unrelated to career goals.

Nearly 60 percent worried that the career center would not be available while the campus was closed, and they hoped the center would provide career services and advice about employers that are still hiring.

Such help needs to be distributed more broadly and equally, by using technology and integrating career guidance into the academic program, says Cruzvergara. After all, low-income students struggle to get through college and launch even in a healthy economy. This impending recession — like economic downturns of the recent past — already seems to be hitting low-income families hardest, in both wealth and health.

“Career centers need to think about how we ensure we’re not losing any students, with people falling through the cracks,” she says. “They have to start thinking about their services in terms of serving 100 percent of the students — not just 20 percent of students, which, unfortunately for a lot of career centers, is what’s happening.”

An Enduring Setback

After all, for many students, this is a perilous time to go looking for a first job. “Graduates and labor-market entrants are a particularly vulnerable population in a recession,” says Hannes Schwandt, an assistant professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, who studies how recessions affect health and well-being. “The impacts on them are stronger and, in particular, more lasting than for the rest of society.”

Of course, many graduates simply aren’t able to find jobs, which gives them a late start in the labor market. Those who do find jobs, says Schwandt, often have to settle for positions at businesses and organizations with lower prestige than where they might have landed in better times, and it takes them longer to climb back up to posts that match their résumés and talents.

“Traditional economic theories suggest that these economic fluctuations are temporary and shouldn’t have any long-lasting impacts,” says Schwandt. But his research suggests that setbacks like these will affect the salaries of graduates for years to come. “For every percentage increase in the unemployment rate,” Schwandt says, “recession graduates suffer a 3-percent income loss at the beginning, and this effect fades out only in 10 to 15 years.”

What’s more, recession graduates wind up with lasting effects on their health. Schwandt’s studies indicate that cohorts of people who graduate during economic downturns show a higher mortality rate, with more-frequent incidence of death from heart disease, lung cancer, liver disease, and drug overdoses. They are also less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced and childless.

Of course, says Schwandt, recessions and economic downturns have different shapes, and economists can’t necessarily compare past recessions to the Covid-19 crisis, which is unusual and unprecedented in many ways. And the outcome for any particular individual depends largely on personal circumstances, background wealth, and grit.

Thinking Long Term

Students who were recruited by elite businesses might come out ahead. Ernst & Young hired its interns in the fall, and the company plans to honor its offers to those students, says Dan Black, a head recruiter for EY, which is setting up virtual orientations and internship arrangements. This is a moment for a company to show new and prospective employees how it handles a crisis, says Black.

“But like many other recruiting leaders and business people, we are trying to think beyond just this immediate time,” he says. The fall semester is typically a heavy recruiting time for companies, and companies are already thinking ahead about how to recruit if classes don’t reconvene. But Black says that students should also make a plan to network and connect to prospective employers if they wind up staying home.

Those students, says Black, might need to reconsider what the first steps in their career would be, and even take volunteer jobs to start to get there, if necessary. But they should concentrate on experiences that convey broad, transferable skills — and consider how to signal that to a recruiter like Black.

“When we’re recruiting students,” he says, “I’m not seeing tons of amazing experiences in consulting and accounting, the stuff that we do. What I’m seeing is someone that was trusted by the local deli to open and close the shop, building rapport with customers, supply chains, helping to restock, and those kinds of things.

“It’s building experiences — whether they be work or volunteer — that will build your résumé,” he says, “so when we’re over this hump, you have something to show for the time.”