One Friday night during her senior year, Sara Casey’s friend insisted on bringing over flashcards. They spent the night not studying for an upcoming test, but practicing answers to job interview questions.
“I feel like that was definitely a result of how competitive that (time) was,” said Casey, Education ’03. “That made all of us really know that we had to work really hard if we wanted to have (a job) after college.”
Casey remembers being impressed at an orientation for the School of Education and Social Policy that cited high numbers of graduates who “ended up in these fabulous jobs with great salaries.” By the time she finished her degree in 2003, Casey and graduates across the country found themselves entering a job market aggravated by both a growing national debt and the Sept. 11 attacks. It was dramatically different from the highs of the late ’90s, when they entered college.
an attractive alternative
Casey had long planned to apply for the Teach For America program and is now nearing the end of her two-year commitment teaching elementary school in the South Bronx of New York. The job market when she graduated made the program look even more attractive.
“I didn’t even want to be a part of the race for jobs,” she said. “So I really put everything I had in the Teach For America thing and I just hoped and hoped that it would work out.”
Her story is one that was repeated many times in the years following Sept. 11, 2001. The end of college is a trying time, but students looking for jobs in 2002 and 2003 navigated a landscape that included a stagnant home economy, an overseas war and a slowly healing wound on the public consciousness.
Each graduate adapted in his or her own way, but collectively they fed trends that are beginning to present themselves. These trends include a shift toward nonprofit and service-based organizations as well as a more general desire for jobs that have a tangible impact on society.
Northwestern has seen its own surge of interest in the service sector since 2001, according to Brett Boettcher, an adviser at University Career Services.
“Immediately following 9/11, I would say that my areas became all of a sudden very, very popular,” said Boettcher, who focuses on jobs in the education, government, nonprofit and law sectors. Boettcher also runs the Martin Luther King Jr. job fair for nonprofits, which he said drew about 250 before Sept. 11 but spiked at almost 600 the year after. The fair has since returned to previous attendance levels.
Nationally, Teach For America, saw dramatic increases in interest after Sept. 11. The number of applicants jumped from 7,500 in fall 2001 to 14,000 in fall 2002, according to Laura Nalley, the program’s recruitment director for the Midwest.
J.P. Adams, a Weinberg senior who attended a Teach For America informational meeting Winter Quarter, said Sept. 11 hadn’t drastically changed his career goals but did slightly “burst (his) bubble.”
“It kind of shed light on the fact that a lot of people’s lives are different from mine,” he said. “And that since I’ve been given so much that they haven’t, I have a duty to give back.”
‘jobs that make a difference’
From 2001 to 2004, national applicants to the Peace Corps increased about 41 percent from 8,917 to 12,623, according to Scott Roskelley, the Chicago office’s public affairs specialist. Americorps application numbers also spiked in 2002. They have remained high, reflecting a nationwide trend toward civic engagement observed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, said students leaving college have been increasingly concerned with finding “jobs that make a difference.”
“The problem is, your initial jobs aren’t always geared toward that,” he said. “So there is some disillusionment out there.”
Gardner expects the recent growth in nonprofit hiring to continue as private organizations pick up more of the slack for cut-back government programs. Yet he warns that these businesses can only expand in proportion to their incoming donations, which are finite.
Kathy Chan, Weinberg ’01, got her first post-college job with Green Corps one month after the planes crashed into the twin towers. Now she works for Covering Kids and Families Illinois. Like many who have joined the nonprofit ranks in the past four years, the Sept. 11 attacks didn’t so much make her decision as convince her she made the right career choice.
“Looking at the repercussions of what happened after 9/11 to people being racially profiled and the kind of injustices going on with racism and this new kind of human-rights violation, it sparked something new,” Chan said. “It really made me think, wow, it’s even more important for me to be pursuing work in social change now to kind of right some of these wrongs I’m seeing.”
The Daily’s Anna Weaver contributed to this story.
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