At Raytheon Co in Lexington, about 500 college seniors will land full-time jobs or internships this year, down from 600 in 2001-2002, reports spokeswoman Amy Hosmer. She said the bulk of the jobs will go to full-time hires who will work in fields including engineering, finance, supply chain management, and electrical or mechanical engineering.
Members of this year's graduating class who hold degrees in accounting, nursing, the health sciences, or education, as well as liberal arts majors willing to work for nonprofit entities or the federal government, may have less difficulty finding entry-level work than computer science, engineering and finance majors, Luckenbaugh said.
The association also reports that new grads with degrees in business will see higher starting salaries this year, though jobs may not be as plentiful as they were in the past. Business administration graduates will earn, on average, US$36,515 per year, a 3.7 percent increase over the US$35,209 they earned in 2002. Most will work in sales or management trainee positions.
Accounting majors will receive US$41,360 to start, up 2.6 percent. Their average compensation should be higher, ranging from US$45,680 for consulting to US$45,761 for financial analyst jobs.
The forecast is hardly positive for information science and systems graduates and other technical fields. The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that average starting salary offers for information science and systems grads will drop 3.9 percent to US$39,800. Computer science majors are also looking at bad news: Their starting salary will average US$46,536, down 7.6 percent.
Aware that job prospects are not as plentiful as they were two years ago, some seniors are applying to graduate school. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst reports that graduate school application numbers for 2003 rose 6 percent over last year to 11,122. The current total is almost a third higher than in 2000, when the university received 8,537 graduate school applications.
Karen Rafalik, 21, of Schenectady, New York, a senior at Simmons College, plans to go on to graduate study. Rafalik, who majored in sociology and studied psychology, will enroll in a master's-level leadership program that she hopes will eventually guarantee employment as a director of a nongovernmental agency or community organization. Her ultimate goal? To one day earn a doctoral degree and work as a forensic psychologist.
"With a sociology degree, you can't counsel anyone," Rafalik said. "All you can do is hold assistant or research type roles. I'd like to do more than that. But it's hard to get jobs without a higher degree unless you have major connections."
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