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December graduation is often overlooked. Upperclassmen may say goodbye to a handful of friends after fall finals, but there is no ceremony dedicated to mid-year graduates, who are invited to return to march in May.
As many as 500 students graduated from the University of Maine last month and are now either searching for jobs or settling in at new offices.
According to Linda Reid, associate director of the Office of Student Records, 457 applications for graduation were received for Dec. 2010; however, a final count of graduates will not be tallied until mid-February when colleges confer degrees on graduates.
Lisa Stilley, grading specialist and degree auditor for the Office of Student Records, wrote in an e-mail that each college has until Jan. 24 to review students’ records and determine whether they will be awarded degrees.
Applications for May graduation are not due until March 15 but the university awarded 1,421 degrees in May 2010. According to Stilley, 402 undergraduate students and 64 graduate students have already applied for May graduation. Numbers for both graduations include candidates for undergraduate as well as graduate degrees.
While a December graduation is at odds with the popular conception of grinning grads tossing their caps into a blue summer sky, those who graduate in winter may gain an upper hand.
Some students may have mismanaged their time, following a five or a four-and-a-half-year plan. Others may have switched majors mid-stream and thrown off graduation timelines. Others may have graduated early, unable or unwilling to stretch credit requirements through the spring semester.
Whether they do so accidentally or through careful planning, entering the job market in January may help college graduates find employment more quickly than students who graduate en masse in May, especially if they hold certain degrees.
Economy on the up-swing
Data released by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics this month about unemployment in December 2010 show that the job market for UMaine December graduates has improved slightly from where it stood mid-semester and markedly from where it stood a year previous. The national unemployment rate for last month was 9.4 percent, 0.2 percent lower than in October 2010 and 0.6 percent lower than in December 2009.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics categorized the characteristics of unemployed people. The rate of unemployment for adult men stood at 9.4 percent and for adult women stood at 8.1 percent. Whites saw 8.5 percent, blacks saw 15.8 percent and Hispanics saw 13.0 percent unemployment.
Automatic Data Processing, Inc., one of the nation’s largest payroll firms, published its December 2010 National Employment Report on Jan. 5, 2011. ADP’s report detailed the 297,000 jobs created in the private sector from November to December last year. The spike in job creation, more than triple the amount of jobs created in the preceding month, intimates a receptive job market for December 2010 graduates.
ADP reported that “employment in the service-providing sector rose by 270,000 in December, the 11th consecutive monthly gain and the largest monthly increase” in the 10 years since the company began aggregating data. The report elaborated that the remaining 27,000 jobs were created in the goods-producing sector of the economy.
Medium-sized businesses, defined as employing between 50 and 499 people, saw the largest increase with 144,000 new jobs. Small businesses gained 117,000 jobs and large businesses gained 36,000 jobs.
The Job Outlook 2011 Survey, published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers in November 2010, foretold this economic recovery. NACE compiled surveys detailing expected hiring in 2011 from 172 of the association’s employer members, including GEICO, ConAgra Foods, Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc.
Of those 172 employers, 47.7 percent expect to fill more positions than they did in 2010. The same 172 employers plan to hire 13.5 percent more graduates holding bachelor’s degrees than last year.
This is a marked improvement over spring 2009’s job outlook when NACE members reported they would hire 21.6 percent less graduates than they had in 2008 and over fall 2010’s outlook when members reported they would hire 6.9 percent less graduates than they had in 2009.
Since the spring of 2010, economic optimism has been rising; first due to an expectation to hire 5.3 percent more graduates in the spring of 2010 than in the fall 2009 and now to hire 13.5 percent more graduates than in the spring of 2010.
Graduate smart
The overall improvement of the job market is welcome news for college graduates; however, students expecting to graduate within the next couple of years could benefit further from timing their dives into the applicant pool.
Future teachers could do best to graduate in May since mid-year classroom jobs are scarce. Future accountants and business administrators could do best to graduate in December since most corporate fiscal years begin on Jan. 1. Future health professionals could benefit from either a May or December graduation date, since demand for their skills is constant.
According to Patty Counihan, director of the UMaine Career Center, the high unemployment trend habitually seen each December may be more the result of strapped corporate wallets at year’s end rather than of a foundering economy. While corporations can be liberal with pink slips near the holidays, Counihan said, they are as likely to flesh out their payroll at the start of a new fiscal year as they are to trim it down toward the end.
“It seems an awful lot of pink slips go out at the end of the year,” she said, adding that those open positions are often filled early in the next calendar year “once things settle down.”
“What’s funny about those statistics is it’s all in context,” Counihan added. “Oftentimes it has to do with the particular jobs within that company.”
“Employers tend to forget about the academic year. They don’t know when the jobs are going to open up,” Counihan told The Maine Campus in December (“Diploma dates tied to job odds,” Dec. 6, 2010). “In that way, I think December grads have a leg up.”
A survey of 2010 college graduates conducted by NACE determined the top five degree programs in terms of garnering job offers. 46.9 percent of accounting students had received a job offer by graduation day, as had 45.4 percent of business administration students, 44.1 percent of computer science students, 41 percent of engineering students and 40.5 percent of social science students.
Students from colleges and universities nationwide responded to the survey, including students from UMaine and system campuses in Augusta, Fort Kent, Machias and Presque Isle.
UMaine’s office of institutional studies conducts its own surveys of recent graduates. The latest numbers available are from students who graduated in December 2007, May 2008 or August 2008.
Completed surveys from 621 of the over 1,500 graduates from that time frame showed that 71.2 percent of those students had full-time employment by February 2010 while 14.4 percent worked part-time, 7.9 percent were enrolled as graduate students and were not working, and 6.5 percent were unemployed.
According to the “Life After UMaine” 2007-2008 survey, 80 percent of the students who reported they were working full-time said their jobs were related to their degrees.
The survey showed in-state students tended to find employment in Maine while out-of-state students either returned home or found jobs in other states. Approximately 70 percent of in-state students remained in Maine and approximately 84 percent of out-of-state students left Maine.
Counihan said the Career Center provides students who have already graduated from the university free services, such as one-on-one career coaching and resume review, for a year after graduation. If graduates have moved away from the university, she said, counselors can provide services via e-mail or phone.
Nursing in Maine
“Look at what’s happening with nursing right now,” Counihan said. “If you’re a December grad in nursing, you’re probably in panic mode right now.”
Nancy Fishwick, director of the school of nursing, said recent rashes of layoffs in hospitals and a moratorium on hiring new nurses tell of the uneasy atmosphere in health professions.
“The peculiar thing going on right now, and it’s been going on all year, lots of hospitals weren’t hiring nurses. Period. There are layoffs going on up and down the East Coast and in Maine as well. Patient census is down in most hospitals,” Fishwick said, suggesting that low reimbursement for services has also stilted hiring practices.
“Some big hospitals are closing entire services,” Fishwick added. “It is a ripple effect of the economy.”
Due to restricted hiring, Fishwick suggested that students who graduate in December, at least those who graduate from the University of Maine, may have an advantage in the local job market.
“I suspect that the ones who graduate in December might have a little bit of a leg up because, I don’t think, Husson or Eastern Maine Community College graduate students in December,” said Fishwick. “There’s going to be a bigger infusion of new nursing grads in the spring” from all local nursing schools, but UMaine nursing grads who graduated this December will have had several more months during which to find employment.
“A lot of our graduates want to stay in Maine,” Fishwick said. “They haven’t been snapped up as fast as they used to be.”
Nursing students used to be able to expect job offers in their final semester, according to Fishwick. Now, they have to be more proactive about sending out resumes and spend more time preparing for interviews at the local and national level.
Teaching in Maine
Anne Pooler, interim dean of the college of education and human development, suggested that students who graduate in December with degrees in elementary or secondary education may have a similar advantage to that of December nursing graduates.
“In the [preschool] to 12 environment there is a rhythm to the year, usually September to June,” said Pooler. “However, there are opportunities for people who graduate in December. It can be long-term subbing. There’s a grad who got that position because the teacher went on maternity leave.”
Pooler said students who are flexible in taking substitute teacher or ed-tech positions may see those jobs turn into long-term employment. Taking those sort of positions, rather than holding out for a permanent classroom of their own, can provide an opportunity for school administrators to see recent graduates’ skills before the new school year, when positions often become available.
Pooler emphasized that education students often see their graduation timelines thrown off due to work or family obligations or due to their student teaching requirements, which may cause them to spend a semester at recess rather than research.
According to Pooler, students who graduate with degrees in elementary or secondary education often spend time in the classroom before returning for graduate-level studies.
“Unless they’ve decided on a particular degree path, most of them will teach for a period of time and then return for a Master’s degree,” Pooler said. Doing so can also allow graduates to spend time with a range of ages and can help them determine whether second grade or senior year is more their style.
Your best option
Upcoming graduates can do more than time their graduation dates in order to secure jobs soon after they receive diplomas, such as accepting less-than-ideal job offers after graduation rather than holding out to see what else may come along.
NACE’s survey of 2010 graduates showed that less students graduated with job offers than in previous years and that those students who did receive job offers were more likely to accept them than were past graduates.
According to NACE, 66 percent of graduating students who applied for jobs in 2007 received offers by graduation day. That percentage decreased to 40 percent in 2009 and to 38 percent last year. With fewer jobs available, students need to be receptive to positions that previously were not attractive to them.
In 2009, only 45 percent of students who received offers accepted them; in 2010, 59 percent of students had accepted job offers by graduation.
While these numbers deal with subsets of graduates, they contributed to the 24.4 percent of total college graduates in 2010 who had jobs secured by graduation day.
With only 1 in 4 college graduates having a job to go to after the pomp and circumstance dies down, it is prudent for upcoming graduates to think critically about approaching the job market. While diving head-first into the applicant pool may work for some, that tactic does not guarantee that they will not find themselves working jobs unrelated to their degrees in an effort to pay their bills. Some careful timing and consideration may be the route to a successful career after graduation rather than just a job.
Bangor Daily News