January 24, 2002
Many Ride Out the Recession in a Graduate School Harbor
By YILU ZHAO
PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 17-- The sagging economy has created a bonanza of
applicants for the nation's schools of business, law, journalism, education
and many other graduate programs as laid-off workers and college seniors
are deciding to wait out the recession by honing their skills.
College job placement offices may be in the doldrums, but admissions
officers at many of the nation's professional schools and graduate programs
say they are being inundated with applications.
The trend is striking. Admission officers at Emory University business
school say applications were up 80 percent at the end of the first round
in the admissions cycle in December in comparison to the same period last
season; those at U.C.L.A. report a 90 percent increase and those at the
University of Chicago report a 100 percent jump. Yale University Law School
says applications are up 57 percent at this point in the season compared
to the same point last year while Vanderbilt says its applications are
up 47 percent. Engineering and education schools talk of similar surges.
The bars for entrance have been raised.
Students at the University of Pennsylvania here give a simple explanation
for the sudden enthusiasm for graduate education: the difficulty of finding
jobs. Dave Feygenson, a senior, would have liked to work on Wall Street
first and attend graduate school later if he could find a job. But after
searching for a job in vain, he has applied to Ph.D. programs in finance
at the nation's top schools.
"Why fight the economy?" he said. "Why not get it done now, since I cannot
find a job anyway."
The only professional schools unaffected by this recession are schools of
medicine. They are usually immune to economic cycles because the completion
of a medical degree and the required residency can take eight or more years,
a tremendous time investment in comparison to studying for other professions.
University officials say it is hardly surprising that during harsh economic
times people turn to graduate and professional schools as havens from market
storms where they can sharpen their skills and improve their credentials for
better times to come. But this year's increase in the number of applicants
is the largest in decades, said many longtime directors of admissions at
professional and graduate schools.
The reaction to hard economic times is not automatically predictable. During
the recession that occurred at the beginning of the 1990's, for instance,
the numbers of applicants to both law and business schools nationwide
slipped, while the application increases to the other professional and
graduate schools were modest.
At the University of Pennsylvania, the job placement office was eerily
quiet on a recent afternoon. No students popped in to inquire about jobs;
no employers called to recruit. But one block away, at the admissions office
of the university's Wharton Business School, virtually every employee of
the admissions office--including the director--was busy opening application
envelopes pouring in from all corners of the country.
Janice L. Austin, the assistant dean of admissions at the law school,
where applications are up 33 percent, has hired four more people simply
to open mails and bought a high-speed printer for letters to applicants.
Rosemaria Martinelli, the director of admissions for Wharton's M.B.A. program,
has led a team that is 15 people larger than last year's to read the
applications day and night and even on weekends. Christopher E. Hopey, the
vice dean of admissions at the school of education, where applications
are up 70 percent, has just ordered 10,000 more letterhead stationery
as the last batch, already an additional order, runs out.
"It's a logistic nightmare," said Dr. Hopey. "But it's a happy problem."
Although the dot-com bubble burst more than a year ago, its effect on
professional and graduate school applications was not obvious until this
round of applications. When many Internet startups first failed last January,
it was already too late to meet the application deadlines for fall 2001
entrance, usually in February or March. But this year, the dot- com
refugees, "disenchanted, disillusioned and disabled to pay rent," in the
words of a University of Pennsylvania spokeswoman, have shown up as
applicants here and elsewhere.
Eric Landry is one. After the Texas software company he worked for laid off
350 people last spring, including him, he decided to apply to the master's
program in software engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
"I have always wanted to go back to school and get the software training that
I need to go to the next level," Mr. Landry said. "But it was never the right
time."
There was simply too much money and excitement to give up. The largest cost
of acquiring a degree, said Edward Snyder, the dean of the business school
at the University of Chicago, was to forgo your current earnings, and weak
economies lower that cost. Federal and private loans--averaging $80,000 for
a law school student, $50,000 for a business student--make the graduate
school years possible.
But while the recession lowers the ante for those prepared to start graduate
education, it has tuned up the anxiety for those ready to finish. Even
second-year M.B.A. students at Wharton, whose predecessors had often
boasted of five, six job offers in previous years, are wringing their hands,
wondering what next.
The hard times have reoriented the college seniors, too, who grew up during
the longest boom in decades. During the 2001-2002 school year, employers
are expected to hire 6 percent to 13 percent fewer college graduates than
the last school year, according to a report released by Collegiate Employment
Research Institute at Michigan State University. The job market for advanced
degree holders will shrink by 20 percent, it also said.
While applications to graduate school are booming, it will be tougher for
college seniors to get into the most selective programs because the number
of available places has not grown substantially. The admissions director
at Emory's business school, for instance, expects the average Graduate
Management Admissions Test score of the new class to go to 670 from last
year's 650.
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