Forty percent of May ASU graduates are still looking for a job, according to an ASU Career Services survey.
The online survey, taken by 2,417 graduates of the spring 2010 class—about a 40 percent response rate—showed that 40 percent are still seeking a job, 16 percent are continuing their education and 30 percent are currently employed. More than 10,000 ASU students received degrees in May.
The online survey was administered by the Institute for Social Science Research at ASU, and the results haven’t changed much since 2009’s survey, said Kitty McGrath, the executive director of Career Services.
Going to graduate school right away, working first or skipping graduate school altogether depends on the student’s career goals.
For example, some law and business graduate schools want work experience, she said.
“The prestigious schools want you to have post-bachelor’s degree formal work experience,” McGrath said.
In ASU’s Master of Business Administration program, students on average have four-and-a-half years of work experience before applying, she said.
“It’s more advantageous for them to get some work experience and then apply for the MBA,” McGrath said. “Law schools are moving in that direction also. They would like people to have had some other professional work experience under their belt and then go to law school.”
For other professions, going to graduate school right away can be more rewarding.
“It depends on what you want to do with your degree,” McGrath said. “There are people who get bachelor’s degrees in a particular discipline who had no intention from the outset of actually working in that field.”
Some students might have just been interested in an area of study and will apply that knowledge to another career area, she said.
“There are others who major in X because their career aspirations exactly match with what X prepares you to do,” McGrath said.
She said it’s important to enter graduate school right away for career fields where a master’s degree or higher is a minimum requirement.
“For example, if you wanted to work in Career Services, generally speaking the minimum requirement is a master’s degree,” McGrath said.
However, a lot of people in Career Services have not followed that exact path, she said.
“Lives are really messy,” McGrath said. “It’s very difficult to generalize and say ‘This is the one way you ought to approach continuing your education.’ It doesn’t work that way in a lot of fields.”
One thing to take into consideration is that certain knowledge, especially in scientific and technical disciplines, continues to change, she said.
“They talk about your shelf-life, your half-life,” McGrath said. “How long will your knowledge that you acquired in school be viable?”
For example, some engineers go back to school to update their knowledge, she said.
The economy can also affect students’ career and academic decisions, she said. It depends on each student’s individual financial situation, but some may not be able to afford graduate school right away and others will.
Students generally don’t go to graduate school just because they can’t find a job, she said, unless their original plan includes a higher degree and they are financially stable.
“It’s not as commonplace as you would think to say, ‘Well, I’ll just go to graduate school until the job market improves,’” McGrath said. “I think students are much more sophisticated than that. It really doesn’t work that way.”
Graduate school is difficult, McGrath said, and shouldn’t necessarily be considered a fallback plan.
“If someone is really passionate about the study, and they’re really excited about it, yes,” she said. “But someone who says ‘Well, I can’t get a job so I’ll just go study something else for a while.’…that doesn’t sound like to me the best way to enter graduate study.”
Josh Niska, a May biochemistry graduate, is one student who decided to go to graduate school right after getting his bachelor’s degree.
He said he decided to go to Harvard Medical School in the fall.
“I’ve just always wanted to be a doctor, and I had a lot of experiences at ASU that confirmed that interest,” Niska said.
One place he interned was at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in downtown Phoenix, where he worked on breast cancer research.
Niska felt he wanted to do more work with cancer as an oncologist, though at one point he considered taking a break before medical school.
“Because it’s such a long road to get an MD, I decided that I just wanted to go straight through,” Niska said.
Nicole Bruno, a May interdisciplinary studies graduate, was offered a job a couple weeks after graduation as a finance director and special events coordinator for the Boy Scouts of America San Francisco Bay Area Council in California.
“I definitely didn’t want to take any time off because I’m already competing with enough people who are unemployed,” Bruno said, including all the other recent and future graduates.
She said it was necessary to have job security and to be able to apply her skills.
“I definitely wanted to be an event planner, so I was really happy when I found a job that would allow me to utilize those skills,” Bruno said.
Yazmin Wadia, a history and political science May graduate, completed college in three years and is going to Willamette University’s College of Law in the fall.
Wadia’s wanted to go to law school since she was 5 years old.
“I guess I’m following my dream,” she said.
She turned down a job offer with the Public Forum Institute, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., where she interned.
“If I took some time off, I’d probably go stir-crazy,” Wadia said. “I definitely need to always be active. I love learning.”
Right now, Wadia is working at the Keg Steakhouse and Bar at Tempe Marketplace to earn money for law school.
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu
