That may ultimately prove true. For now, however, on the eve of her graduation, 28-year-old Ms. Dang is facing the realities of a brutal job market spawned by a weak economy. The biotech job she covets has failed to materialize, and she can’t help wondering what would have happened had she stayed at Merck. "I feel like I’m getting stuck between a rock and a hard place," she says.
It is a tight spot she shares with other newly minted M.B.A.s, whose employment expectations when they enrolled a couple of years ago were nurtured by employers’ demand for members of the class of 2001; in that year, between 80% and 95% of business-school students had a job lined up by graduation, according to surveys of students at major business schools. This year, the percentage is between 50% and 70%.
Especially frustrated are those students who left good jobs because they saw business school as a midcareer boost. Many now question whether it will give their careers any immediate jump at all. Some can’t even return to the jobs they left behind because the positions are no longer available and companies aren’t hiring. "They’re leaving with quite a bit of debt; and particularly for those who are married, it’s difficult and frustrating," says Fred Foulkes, a management professor at Boston University’s School of Management.
Business-school officials caution new M.B.A.s that they shouldn’t expect to realize the full value of the degree right away. But they also concede that over the past 20 years, many students came to see the degree as a ticket to instant gratification.
"The M.B.A. was always a long-term degree, but during the late 1990s, that perception changed" when graduates were able to net exorbitant starting salaries, says Gary Fraser, assistant dean of the office of career development at New York University’s Stern School of Business; he is hopeful that 72% of Stern’s class of 2003 will have jobs by graduation.
At Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in Atlanta, Fred Schwanke is scheduled to graduate this spring but has yet to get a job offer. He taught French at a Baltimore middle school for 22 years before he left to get his M.B.A., hoping to use his French, perhaps at a global company.
Few companies are interested in graduates like Mr. Schwanke, with no business experience. (French also isn’t in high demand, as least while Franco-American tensions simmer.) "I kind of got caught up in the excitement [of the late ’90s] and the idea that you can remake your life and your career," Mr. Schwanke says. "But the last few years have been a reality check."
Even at companies that are traditionally reliable employers of new M.B.A.s, students have faced new competition from nonbusiness students. Jeffrey Tucker, a vice president at consultant Booz Allen Hamilton in New York, says that while the crop of M.B.A.s hired to start this coming fall is more sizable than last year’s, the company is also "aggressively" recruiting from other graduate-degree programs and people with five or more years of industry experience. "It’s just a very tough year for M.B.A.s," he says.
Nathan Farr seconds that. Mr. Farr, who will graduate from Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business in Tempe this spring, says he entered business school assuming it would quickly elevate his market value.
But as he prepares to graduate, he is overqualified for the job he held at a Chicago industrial-distribution company for four years, and lacking fresh offers. So Mr. Farr, 28, is taking the same laborious path trod by many other job seekers -- posting résumés online and trying to build a network of contacts. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be graduating without something," he says.
Some schools say students starting in the fall have more realistic expectations of what an M.B.A. will bring them -- and what it won’t. Connie English, associate director of alumni career services at University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, has already gotten calls from students accepted for the class of 2005 who are trying to plan their careers before they commit to the investment. They are asking her how an M.B.A. will pay off in the long run, she says.
Tara Hale, a 25-year-old Stanford graduate who has been working as a marketing analyst for a medical-device company, will enter UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management this fall. She insists she has no illusions about her job prospects in May 2005. "I realize that I may not get my dream job and dream salary right away," she says. "But I know they will be much more easily attainable with the degree."