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4
Selling Wall Street Short
The job market for 1988
graduates is promising,
except for financiers
t was a frightening lesson about greed,
glory and free enterprise when the
five-year bull market collapsed last
Oct. 19, "Black Monday." Soon there
was more bad news for those who
would be millionaires like Gordon Gekko,
captured so unforgettably in "Wall Street"
by Michael Douglas. On the real Wall
Street, layoffs piled up at securities firms
and investment banks: 1,000 at Kidder,
Peabody & Co.; 800 at Goldman, Sachs &
Co.; 700 at L.F. Rothschild & Co. And
Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc. bought
E.F. Hutton & Co. Inc. and announced that
5,000 staffers would have to go.
For a whole generation of college stu-
dents, who had begun to assume that the
financial markets were a vocational road to
riches, the slump caused bewilderment
about job prospects. Since October the Dow
Jones industrial average has gone through
climbs and dives; whether or not a serious
recession is ahead, uncertainty is the cur-
rent certainty in the financial world.
The entry-level-job picture as a whole
seems promising. The two leading experts
on college employment predict a strong
year overall for graduates, despite the
ups and downs of the market. Northwest-
ern's 1988 Lindquist-Endicott report, for
example, forecasts that business and in-
dustrial firms will increase employment
of graduates with bachelor's degrees by
10 percent and will boost salaries by an
average of about 4 percent.
"Despite the economic doom-
sayers and the stock-market
crash in October, corporate
personnel executives are confi-
dent that the economy will
continue to grow," says Victor
R. Lindquist, Northwestern's
director of placement. Similar-
ly, a Michigan State survey
,predicts that hiring will be up
3.8 percent in 1988; starting
salaries for graduates with
bachelor's degrees will aver-
age $22,600.
Go west, young man: But what of
the fledgling financier? Well,
he or she might think about
looking at banks and broker-
ages in cities other than New
York. The latest report from Truth is st
,rr
I
The party's over: Protesters showing disdain for workers in the financial district
the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics
shows little change in the number of finan-
cial jobs nationwide. The Wall Street firms
themselves maintain a brave front. Most
insist they plan to make minimal, if any,
changes in their plans for hiring 1988 grad-
uates. Terrence R. Connelly, a managing
director of Salomon Brothers Inc., for ex-
ample, says his company will hire as many
people for its two-year analyst program
(the traditional entry-level job) as last year;
in general, he reports, hiring will be "flat or
slightly down." Goldman, Sachs also says
there will be little change in its hiring.
Though Kidder, Peabody admits that its
hiring may be off as much as 15 percent this
year, it has not canceled any
campus visits or pared inter-
view schedules.
Some college-placement offi-
cials are skeptical. They think
that the employment outlook
for seniors is bleaker than the
investment banks will admit.
Joyce L. Watts, placement di-
rector at Northwestern's J.L.
Kellogg Graduate School of
Management, says that the
firms actually hope to chop hir-
ing 60 percent. "If they were to
say too soon that they're not
going to be hiring, there would
be a falling-out on the business
side," Watts says.
Word of hiring cutbacks
SCHWARTZ may lead a client to think that
Sheen a firm is teetering after the
I
ranger: Michael Douglas coaching Charlie
30 NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS
MARCH 1988