Independent Perspective News

"It's pretty grim," said Jack R. Rayman, the director of career services at Pennsylvania State University. Its graduate-school fair drew thousands of students this year, filling large ballrooms in the student union.

Over all, the unemployment rate for people ages 20 through 24 rose to 10.1 percent last month, up from 9.9 percent a year earlier and less than 7 percent in 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The jobless rate for the entire work force was 6 percent last month.

Courtney Flaks, 21, a senior at the University of North Carolina from North Brunswick, N.J., said her plan was "just to go home and annoy people for jobs. I don't have any idea how long it's going to take."

Ms. Flaks, who is seeking a job as a graphic designer at a magazine, had a summer internship at Seventeen magazine and recently won a competition to redesign the nameplate of a campus literary magazine. Even so, she has had little success just finding openings to apply for.

"I finally have an interview, kind of," Ms. Flaks said, of an upcoming visit to Condé Nast, the publishing company in New York. "It's an exploratory interview. I don't know what that means." Many of this year's success stories have come at companies like Newell that were the antithesis of excitement during the dot-com craze of the late 1990's. This year, however, excitement requires little more than an offer of a good-paying job.

According to Marcia B. Harris, the director of career services here, North Carolina's biggest recruiters — and thus hottest companies — include Newell; Enterprise Rent-a-Car; Ferguson Enterprises, a distributor of plumbing supplies, and Modern Woodmen of America, an insurer.

Newell has a management trainee program that is hiring 400 college graduates this year across the country.

By contrast, Accenture and Ernst & Young, consulting firms that specialize in technology and that each hired 25 seniors at the peak of the boom, hired a combined total of three or four this year, Ms. Harris said.

Jon Narveson, another senior, from Asheville, N.C., came to Chapel Hill expecting that he would end up at a computer company, he said. He will instead move to Charlotte this summer and oversee Newell products at some Lowe's home-improvement stores in the area.

"Whether it's fashionable or unfashionable doesn't matter to me," Mr. Narveson said. What matters, he said, is that he likes the Newell executives he met and that they seem eager to help him learn the business.

The students who have been accepted by Teach for America or the Peace Corps, in spite of this year's odds, express similar gratitude.

After watching many of last year's seniors return home after graduation without jobs, Stephanie L. Scott adopted an attitude of "whatever it takes," she said. As a backup, she and a friend met in a library for two hours, three times a week over the course of two months, to study for the G.R.E. But her first priority was Teach for America, and she will begin teaching in Louisiana this summer.

"Right now, it almost doesn't matter what you're doing," said Ms. Scott, who is from Goldsboro, N.C., and was the first person in her family to attend college. "If you have a job, people look at you like, `You're so lucky.'"

In fact, many seniors said that the last few months had given them a sense of rejection on a scale they had never before felt. Ms. Bushey said she could not help but compare applying to college, when she was accepted at North Carolina before Thanksgiving, to the string of law-school rejections she received, including some from places she had thought of as safety schools.

Some juniors here said they were already preparing themselves for similar experiences next year.

"When we were going into school, there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm to go get your four years of education and then get a job," said Matt Tepper, North Carolina's student body president, who will remain on campus for both sessions of summer school after struggling to find a paid internship. "Now it seems like everybody is going to law school."

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