RECRUITING OF GRADUATES AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 10, 1993                   TAG: 9302100069
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium
RECRUITING OF GRADUATES AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE
In this year's recruiting season for college graduates, nurses are hot but aerospace engineers are not.
Companies hope to hire more college graduates this year than in 1992, but only a few fields are expected to benefit, college placement officers say. With many companies restructuring and eliminating jobs, there are fewer openings for job seekers straight out of school.
Health care is one industry that is hiring, said Dawn Oberman, a statistical services specialist at College Placement Council Inc. in Bethlehem, Pa. Jobs also are available in management information systems for people who teach others how to use computers.
A focus on the environment has created openings for engineers, geologists, biologists and chemists. And with President Clinton promising to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, times should be good for civil engineers, Oberman added.
But other industries are cutting jobs just as aggressively. Military cutbacks and hardships in the commercial airline industry have virtually shut down the market for new aerospace engineers. Would-be nuclear engineers may need to find another specialty. Jobs in finance and banking, except for technical and back-office jobs, still are hard to come by.
"There's a fundamental shift and most of it has come from a decrease [in campus recruiting] among the Fortune 500 companies," said Richard Stewart, director of placement at Purdue University. "You can look at your list of companies having problems, and that's the company that's not coming to campus now."
A survey of 316 companies last fall by the College Placement Council found 54 percent of employers predicting they would hire 7.7 percent more graduates in 1993 than last year. Actual hires were projected to rise to 70 per company from 65.
"However, talking to placement officers this past January and December, we haven't seen that yet," Oberman said.
Not only do many recruiters have fewer jobs to offer, they are cutting back on recruiting costs.
"Back in the heyday of the 1980s, companies would send 30 or 40 recruiters to campus," said Vicki B. Lynn, director of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Career Development Center. "Half of the people would be standing around with nothing to do." Now, companies either don't come at all or they send just a few recruiters.
And companies surveyed by College Placement said they plan to visit 11.3 percent fewer campuses this year.
The number of job offers continues to fall. At Rensselaer, 47 percent of the companies that recruited on campus last year made a job offer, down from 63 percent in 1991, Lynn said.
Colleges, moreover, are turning out more graduates to compete for fewer jobs. Dan Hacker, a U.S. Labor Department economist, said that from now until 2005, the number of college graduates will outpace the number of available jobs by 20 percent each year.
There are some bright spots. While big companies are cutting back, jobs are opening up in smaller firms. But these are hard to come by and tend to be at companies that cannot afford to send recruiters to campus.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB