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    College Graduates Find Booming Job Market a Year After Pandemic Lows

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    Seniors and graduates are again in demand as companies revive recruiting, underscoring the economic premium that comes with a diploma.Trevaughn Wright-Reynolds, a senior at Colby College in Maine, expected a lengthy job search when he returned to campus in August. “I wasn’t sure how much interest I was going to get,” he said. “I didn’t know what to think of the job market.”It didn’t take him long to find out. By September, he was in the final round of interviews with several suitors, and on Oct. 1, Mr. Wright-Reynolds accepted a position with a proprietary trading firm in Chicago. “I didn’t think I would get an offer this quickly,” he said.For many college students, the pandemic’s arrival last year did more than disrupt their studies, threaten their health and shut down campus life. It also closed off the usual paths that lead from the classroom to jobs after graduation. On-campus recruiting visits were abandoned, and the coronavirus-induced recession made companies pull back from hiring.But this year, seniors and recent graduates are in great demand as white-collar employers staff up, with some job-seekers receiving multiple offers. University placement office directors and corporate human resources executives report that hiring is running well above last year’s levels, and in some cases surpasses prepandemic activity in 2019.“The current market is great for employment,” said Lisa Noble, director of employer partnerships and emerging pathways at Colby. “There was a lot of trepidation for companies in 2020. People wanted to see how things would work out and were stalling.” Since June 1, Ms. Noble has had discussions with 428 employers, compared with 273 in the same period last year.Much of the recruiting is taking place virtually, as are job fairs and even many internships. But the reliance on virtual platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams for interviews, job offers and eventually welcoming new hires aboard hasn’t dimmed enthusiasm among employers.“The appetite for college labor is strong right now, whether it’s student positions, or part time, all the way through entry-level jobs,” said Jennifer Neef, director of the Career Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.That appetite at this stage of the pandemic — when overall U.S. employment remains more than five million jobs below the level in early 2020 — underscores the longstanding economic premium for those with a college education over holders of just a high school diploma.The unemployment rate for all workers with a college degree stood at 2.8 percent in August, compared with 6 percent for high school graduates with no college. Among workers 22 to 27, the jobless rate in June was 6.2 percent for those with at least a bachelor’s degree and 9.6 percent for those without one, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.“We’ve seen a bifurcation in the labor market recovery,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “College graduates were less affected by job losses and have seen a faster rebound while people with high school diplomas or less witnessed a much more serious decline in employment opportunities during the Covid crisis.”What’s more, the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus has been a one-two punch for those lacking a college degree, hitting the sectors they depend on the most, like restaurants and bars, hotels and retail businesses. By contrast, white-collar employers are thriving.Office work can also be done remotely, a key advantage over face-to-face jobs dealing with consumers that frequently employ less-educated workers. In many cases, the new hires will rarely set foot at corporate headquarters, with orientation and full-time work mostly taking place online.And the courtship rituals of recruiters haven’t changed, even if everything is done over the internet.“It’s back to business as usual,” said Wendy Dziorney, global university hiring leader at HP Inc. The company plans to hire 315 graduates of the class of 2021 in the United States, compared with 126 from the class of 2020 and 210 in the class of 2019.Fall marks the peak of the recruiting season on campus, with interviews and full-time offers for seniors, while internships beckon for sophomores and juniors.Students in search of jobs and internships gathered to listen to recruiters from a consulting firm at Colby College last week.Tristan Spinski for The New York Times“October is our busiest month,” said Jennifer Newbill, director of university recruitment at Dell Technologies. Her company has extended full-time offers to more than 1,300 graduates this year, up 60 percent from 2020.Recruiters of students in the hottest majors — including engineering, computer sciences, accounting and economics — find themselves butting up against one another for the same candidates.“I’ve been with the firm 26 years and I’ve never seen it this competitive,” said Rod Adams, talent acquisition and onboarding leader at PwC, the accounting and consulting firm. “It’s not just our direct competitors but also tech firms, big industry, banks and investment companies.”For this year, PwC plans to extend offers for internships and full-time jobs to 12,000 people, up 15 to 20 percent from 2020 and 10 percent above 2019 levels. Like many employers, PwC is approaching students earlier and trying to get top candidates to make a commitment as soon as possible.The interviewing process used to extend through November, but Mr. Adams hopes to get offers out by the middle of this month and to hear back from candidates by Thanksgiving. “We are moving faster, and the moment students set foot on campus, they start hearing from us,” Mr. Adams said.PwC is using a hybrid approach to recruiting, with Mr. Adams and his team visiting a few campuses in person while contacting many more virtually. “It allows us to extend our reach,” he said.In particular, the company has made an effort to pursue students from historically Black colleges and universities, recruiting from 35 of these institutions; five years ago, it recruited from seven.The rise in campus hiring means more choices for some current students as well as belated help for the pandemic-hit class of 2020, said Annette McLaughlin, director of the Office of Career Services at Fordham University.“Activity is up significantly from last year and is about 10 percent higher than it was before the pandemic,” she said. “It’s likely that students will get multiple offers and they will have to choose.”“The current market is great for employment,” said Lisa Noble, director of employer partnerships and emerging pathways at Colby.Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesThe rebound is also benefiting recent Fordham graduates like Jonah Isaac, who finished school in May 2020, two months after the pandemic struck. Several companies withdrew offers, and Mr. Isaac, a business administration major, spent a year interviewing for spots that never materialized until a Fordham alumnus helped him get a sales development job with Moody’s Analytics in June 2021.“It was a huge hit for many students, and not getting anything was demoralizing,” said Mr. Isaac, a Chicago native who was a wide receiver on Fordham’s football team. “I’d get to the third or fourth interview, and they’d say, ‘Sorry, we’re going in another direction.’”Members of the class of 2021 have had an easier time. Brittanie Rice, a Spelman College graduate, landed a job at Dell after working as an intern the summer before. “I felt lucky,” she said. “A lot of my friends had cancellations left and right, but my internship went on.”Ms. Rice was a computer science major, an especially sought-after concentration for many big employers. But Ms. Newbill, the university recruitment director for Dell, said her company was also hiring students majoring in nontechnical fields — like philosophy and journalism — for sales positions. “Sales is about the personality, not the degree,” she said.Still, graduates in STEM-related fields are having the most success.Manuel Pérez, 23, is two months into his job as a data analyst at Accenture, which led him to move to Nashville after graduating from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.Mr. Pérez, an information systems major, said he attended a virtual job fair last October and applied to work at Accenture after meeting with recruiters over Microsoft Teams. After three rounds of interviews, he received a job offer in March and started his position in the summer.“I had other job offers, but they all wanted me to start immediately, and I wanted to graduate first,” said Mr. Pérez, from Camuy, P.R. “I feel the job demand has grown, with more people demanding better pay, in every sector from retail to white-collar jobs.”Mr. Wright-Reynolds, the Colby senior, is studying statistics with a minor in computer sciences. A native of Medford, Mass., he will start at the trading firm in Chicago in August.“This was a great opportunity, and I couldn’t go wrong in accepting it,” he said. “I feel like a weight is off my shoulders. I have a lot more time to enjoy senior year.” More

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    Biden $1.8 Trillion Plan: Child Care, Student Aid and More

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    The proposed American Families Plan would expand access to education and child care. It would be financed partly through higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Wednesday detailed a $1.8 trillion collection of spending increases and tax cuts that seeks to expand access to education, reduce the cost of child care and support women in the work force, financed by additional taxes on high earners.The American Families Plan, as the White House calls it, follows the $2.3 trillion infrastructure package President Biden introduced last month, bringing his two-part package of economic proposals to just over $4 trillion. He will present the details to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening.The proposal includes $1 trillion in new spending and $800 billion in tax credits, much of which is aimed at expanding access to education and child care. The package includes financing for universal prekindergarten, a federal paid leave program, efforts to make child care more affordable, free community college for all, aid for students at colleges that historically serve nonwhite communities, expanded subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and an extension of new federal efforts to fight poverty.Administration officials cast the plan as investing in an inclusive economy that would help millions of Americans gain the skills and the work flexibility they need to build middle-class lifestyles. They cited research on the benefits of government spending to help young children learn. In a 15-page briefing document, they said the package would help close racial and gender opportunity gaps across the economy.Many of the provisions, like tax credits to help families afford child care and a landmark expansion of a tax credit meant to fight child poverty, build on measures in the $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan Mr. Biden signed into law last month. The package would make many of those temporary measures permanent.But the plan also includes a maze of complicated formulas for who would benefit from certain provisions — and how much of the tab state governments would need to pick up.The package could face even more challenges than the American Jobs Plan, Mr. Biden’s physical infrastructure proposal, did in Congress. The president has said repeatedly that he hopes to move his agenda with bipartisan support. But his administration remains far from reaching a consensus with Republican negotiators in the Senate.Republicans have expressed much less interest in additional spending for education, child care and paid leave than they have for building roads and bridges. They have also chafed at the tax increases Mr. Biden has proposed, including the ones that will help pay for his latest package.The president is proposing an increase in the marginal income tax rate for the top 1 percent of American income earners, to 39.6 percent from 37 percent. He would increase capital gains and dividend tax rates for those who earn more than $1 million a year. And he would eliminate a provision in the tax code that reduces capital gains on some inherited assets, like vacation homes, that largely benefits the wealthy.Mr. Biden would also invest $80 billion in personnel and technology enhancements for the I.R.S., in hopes of netting $700 billion in additional revenues from high earners, wealthy individuals and corporations that evade taxes.Republicans and conservative activists have criticized all those measures. Administration officials told reporters that the president would be open to financing the spending and tax credits in his plan through alternative means, essentially challenging Republicans to name their own offsets, as Mr. Biden did with his physical infrastructure proposal.Still, many of the details in his new proposal poll well with voters across the political spectrum. Much of the package could win the support of the full Democratic caucus in Congress, which would need to band together to pass all or part of the plan through the fast-track process known as budget reconciliation, which bypasses a Senate filibuster.Expanded access to government-subsidized preschool and community college may have broad appeal. Workers with only high school degrees are often stuck in low-wage jobs, and two-thirds of mothers with young children are employed, and thus need reliable child care. The high cost of quality day care and pre-K puts these services out of reach for many families, who may rely on informal networks of relatives and neighbors who are untrained in early education.Expanding access to pre-K has been particularly popular over the past decade in states and cities, including some with Republican governors. A large body of research shows that achievement gaps between poor and middle-class children emerge in the earliest years of childhood and are present on the first day of kindergarten. Administration officials contend that free, quality early childhood education can both help cash-strapped parents and build students’ skills in ways that will help them become more productive workers.Still, there are major disagreements about how generous any expansion of pre-K should be. President Barack Obama’s administration generally favored a centrist approach in which new seats were geared toward lower-income families.Mr. Biden’s plan differs in that it calls for universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds, including those from affluent families. That is the same approach pioneered in recent years by city programs in New York and Washington, which expanded quickly to serve a diverse swath of families, but not without some evidence that they replicated the segregation and inequities of the broader K-12 education system.Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, has been a critic of the universal approach, instead favoring more targeted programs. He questioned whether states would do their part to fund the expansion and said the goal of paying all early childhood workers $15 per hour was too modest to broadly improve the quality and stability of the work force.“How governors weigh these competing priorities, ethically and politically, remains an open question,” he said.The proposed investment from Washington comes at a precarious time. Preschool enrollment declined by nearly 25 percent over the past year, largely because of the coronavirus pandemic. As of December, about half of 4-year-olds and 40 percent of 3-year-olds attended pre-K, including in remote programs. And only 13 percent of children in poverty were receiving an in-person preschool education in December, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.Unlike the preschool proposal, the child care plan is not universal. It would offer subsidies to families earning up to 1.5 times their state’s median income, which could be in the low six figures in some locations. It would also continue tax credits approved in the pandemic relief bill this year that offer benefits to people earning up to $400,000 a year.As with Mr. Biden’s previous policy proposals, the American Families Plan offers something to many traditional Democratic Party constituencies. The administration is closely tied to teachers’ unions, and while many early childhood educators are not unionized, the proposal also calls for investments in K-12 teacher education, training and pay, which are all union priorities. One goal is to bring more teachers of color into a public education system where a majority of students are nonwhite.The expansion of free community college would apply to all students, regardless of income. It would require states to contribute to meet the goal of universal access, senior administration officials said on Tuesday. Mr. Biden would also expand Pell grants for low-income students and subsidize two years of tuition at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as at institutions that serve members of Native American tribes and other minority groups.Mr. Fuller said he expected the community college proposal to effectively target spending to the neediest students. About one-third of all undergraduates attend public two-year colleges, which serve a disproportionate number of students from low-income families.The paid leave program will phase in over time. The administration’s fact sheet says it will guarantee 12 weeks of paid “parental, family and personal illness/safe leave” by its 10th year in existence. Workers on leave will earn up to $4,000 a month, with as little as two-thirds or as much as 80 percent of their incomes replaced, depending on how much they earn.Other provisions include late concessions to key Democratic constituencies. Administration officials had removed the health care credits last week but added them back under pressure from Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and others. They bucked pressure from House and Senate Democrats to make permanent an expanded child tax credit created by the pandemic relief bill, extending it through 2025. But the plan would make permanent one aspect of the expanded credit, which allows parents with little or no income to reap its benefits regardless of how much they earn. More

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    Why Are There So Few Black Economists at the Fed?

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Jobs CrisisCurrent Unemployment RateWhen the Checks Run OutThe Economy in 9 ChartsThe First 6 MonthsJ. Monroe Gamble IV pushed for changes to the hiring process at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.Credit…Christopher Smith for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexWhy Are There So Few Black Economists at the Fed?Monroe Gamble became the San Francisco Fed’s first Black research assistant in 2018. His path shows why fixing a striking diversity shortfall will take commitment.J. Monroe Gamble IV pushed for changes to the hiring process at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.Credit…Christopher Smith for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — J. Monroe Gamble IV was the first Black research assistant to work at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He started in 2018.That one data point speaks to a broader reality: Even as America’s central bank dedicates research and attention to racial economic outcomes and publicly champions inclusion, it has had a poor record of building a work force that looks like the population it is meant to serve.Many parts of the Fed system, which includes the Federal Reserve Board in Washington and 12 regional banks, began to concentrate more intently on diversifying their heavily white economics staffs only within the last decade, prompted in part by the 2010 Dodd Frank Act, which pushed the board to hire more broadly. When it comes to employing Black economists in particular, the central bank still falls short.Officials have often blamed the pipeline — Ph.D. economists are heavily white and Asian — but a New York Times analysis suggests the issue goes even beyond that. Black people are less represented within the Fed than in the field as a whole. Only two of the 417 economists, or 0.5 percent, on staff at the Fed’s board in Washington were Black, as of data the Fed provided last month. Black people make up 13 percent of America’s population and 3 to 4 percent of the U.S. citizens and permanent residents who graduate as Ph.D. economists each year.Practices that favor job candidates with similar life experiences and those from elite economics programs, which are often heavily white, have sometimes prevented diverse hiring, current and former employees said. A brash culture can make some parts of the central bank unwelcoming, which can lower retention. More

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    Up to 30 Million in U.S. Have the Skills to Earn 70% More, Researchers Say

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUp to 30 Million in U.S. Have the Skills to Earn 70% More, Researchers SayThe findings point to the potential of upward mobility for people without a college degree.Microsoft is one of the major companies that have pledged to adopt skills-based hiring for many jobs, often dropping a college degree requirement.Credit…Stuart Isett for The New York TimesBy More

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    Edward P. Lazear, Economist and Presidential Adviser, Dies at 72

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    Edward P. Lazear, a pioneering labor economist at Stanford University who advised President George W. Bush during the financial crisis, died on Monday. He was 72.The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said. It did not say where he died.Professor Lazear may be best remembered as the founder of a field that has come to be known as personnel economics, which seeks to understand how businesses hire, retain and pay employees. He also founded the Journal of Labor Economics and the Society of Labor Economists.But perhaps his most critical job was as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when the American financial system buckled after a housing and debt bubble had burst, forcing the federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions and rescue a sinking economy.“Eddie Lazear was a rare combination —-an extraordinary academic economist and a dedicated public servant who brought that intellect and skill to the solution of big policy problems,” said Condoleezza Rice, director of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where Professor Lazear held a senior fellowship.In a statement, Mr. Bush called him “a trusted confidant” and “a beloved colleague.”Edward Paul Lazear was born in New York City on Aug. 17, 1948, and grew up in Los Altos, Calif. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1971 and received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where he worked with the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker and adopted his approach of applying economic tools to new domains.Professor Lazear began his professional career in 1974 as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He taught there for almost 20 years before joining the Stanford faculty.“He was the most natural economist I ever came into contact with,” said Paul Oyer, an economist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “He was a deep economic natural thinker; he was born to be an economist.”Professor Lazear wrote a seminal paper about the relationship between worker pay and a company’s productivity and profits; it was based on a case study of the Safelight Glass Company. Productivity at the business soared when it shifted from paying workers an hourly wage to paying them according to the number of windshields they repaired. Professor Lazear figured out that this improvement hadn’t come about just because people had worked harder to earn more money. Rather, he found, the shift in wage policy had changed the composition of the installers: Slower workers had left the company and faster workers had taken their jobs.Professor Lazear wrote another famous paper explaining the rationale behind mandatory retirement, which was outlawed by Congress in 1986. He proposed that it is worthwhile for companies to pay workers less than what they are worth to the business when they are young, and then to raise their wages over time, to the point where they are paying them more than they are worth. But that, he found, meant that employees would try to hang on to their job for too long. Mandatory retirement thus helped solve the problem.“He is the father of a field that has had a lot of influence in the way firms design compensation and make hiring and retention policies,” said Erik Hurst, a labor economist at the University of Chicago. “This is of first-order importance for how people live their lives.”Professor Lazear fell squarely on the right of the economic policy spectrum. He was a fierce critic of the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus policies. He later championed the tax cuts signed by President Trump in 2017. He believed in the efficiency of markets and disliked the minimum wage and other government interventions.But even his ideological opponents acknowledged his integrity and commitment to rigorous thinking.“I admired the purity of his commitment to economics,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president and Treasury secretary. “It is very rare among economists who work on things that have a bearing on politics.”Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard, said Professor Lazear’s work had often reached conclusions at odds with conservative views and policies.“He was not ideological on all things,” Professor Katz said, pointing out Professor Lazear’s work with Richard B. Freeman on the value of works councils, which are used in many European countries to give workers voice and power to negotiate with employers.Professor Lazear’s work also served to dispel the notion popular among American conservatives that policies that guaranteed job security condemned Europe to high unemployment and low productivity.During the financial crisis of the late 2000s and its aftermath, Professor Lazear was a critical voice demanding attention to the faltering job market as millions of people lost jobs and many people struggled to find work for months or even years.“You can see in his policy work these concerns for workers and their skills and how hard it is to transition between industries,” said Austan Goolsbee, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration.Professor Lazear is survived by his wife, Victoria Lazear, and his daughter, Julie Lazear. More