Laid off and certain her work experience and education weren’t sufficient to be competitive in the brutal post-Sept. 11 job market, Kristy Peterson took refuge in business school.
She thought an MBA would give her an edge. And a degree from the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, where she also could get a master’s with an emphasis in sports management, would be one step closer to the job she wanted.
By now, seven months after graduation, the 25-year- old should have been settled into a good marketing job, earning enough to make a big dent in the $40,000 in graduate school loans that came due this month.
But instead of sliding behind a desk, wearing a silk blouse and heels, most days she’s up and at work at The Egg & I by 7 a.m., pouring coffee for other people’s Denver Tech Center power breakfasts.
“Sometimes I think, I can’t wait to be sitting down, out to breakfast, having a business meeting,” she says.
Rent is due. And as bills for car and health insurance, and utilities pile up, less remains of her server pay and the tiny stipend she gets for coaching the pompom squad at ThunderRidge High School.
The student loan is daunting, but deferring the payments would only prolong the pain, she says. “These are all mandatory expenses. I’m actually looking at
going into credit card debt for the first time.”
Peterson typically charges everything, paying off the balance at the end of the month so she can get cash rebates without accruing interest.
But this month, she may not be able to do that. “I used to be really on top of my bills, analyzing things, but lately, I choose not to,” she says. “It’s just depressing.”
Peterson accepted work a few months after graduation but quickly realized the job she thought she would carve out for herself wasn’t what her employer intended.
“I realized they were looking for a sales person to hand out fliers,” she says. “But the job was brand new, and I thought I could define it as I saw fit.”
So now she has dialed back her expectations. Her
rsum is packed with sports marketing work, including a USA Junior Olympic boys volleyball tournament and a high-profile branding event for the Daniels school that combined a business competition and ski race, but she understands that she probably won’t land a job with a sports component.
“In my last year at DU, I probably should have been going in and meeting with recruiters and trying to finalize a job,” Peterson says. “But I was thinking about school and making ends meet, and I was on the board (that managed the race event), and I had other goals I wanted to achieve.
“I wish I had taken more time.”
She can’t take all the blame, though.
While the economy shows signs of rebounding, jobs lost when the technology bubble burst in 2001 are not coming back as quickly as economists had expected. Companies stung in the crash are keeping operations lean and efficient, finding new ways to squeeze productivity from the employees they already have, economists say.
Colorado’s job climate has been especially slow to warm.
For the first time since 2001, the local economy should end the year with a small gain in jobs. University of Colorado economists forecast 43,100 new jobs for 2005, about 35 percent of them in professional and business services.
All of this would be great news for people like Peterson, were it not for the fact that competition for those few jobs has not become less fierce.
“There has been a cataclysmic change in the marketplace,” says Terri Wanger, assistant director of the Suitts Center for Career Placement at Daniels.
Workers who drew salaries north of $500,000 before the downturn now are interviewing for and accepting jobs that pay between $65,000 and $100,000, Wanger says. The competitive pool is deep, pitting people like Peterson, who have the degree but scant work experience, against those who have labored for 10 or 15 years at the top of their fields.
|
SHARE YOUR STORIES
|
|
|
Peterson’s sports concentration makes her search rougher, Wanger says. “In the sports field, in general, they look at everyone coming into the industry as the lowest person on the totem pole. You may ascend very quickly, but they have a great equalizing philosophy of hiring: Come in and prove yourself,” she says. “So many people want to work in the field, they have the luxury of being able to do that.”
The odds of landing a high-paying job quickly are better for people willing to leave the state, Wanger says. “Employers, especially in Denver, are still in the driver’s seat.”
An MBA may give a candidate an edge, but the degree doesn’t come cheap.
According to Nellie Mae Corp.’s National Student Loan Survey, the average MBA candidate borrows about $39,500 to finance the degree. Loan calculators say it takes about $490 a month for 10 years to pay off that sum, assuming the borrower can afford to devote 10 percent of their pre-tax earnings to the debt. The average first-year salary for an MBA was about $57,000 in 2001.
A post-graduate job search now takes about eight months, which means people also need a cushion to carry them through when the loans come due, typically six months after graduation.
“To think that 75,000 people across the country who just got an MBA are going to get a job in 90 days, it’s just not going to happen,” says Prof. Stephen Haag, director of the MBA program at Daniels. “You’ve gotta keep that in mind, especially if you’re borrowing a bunch of money.”
Dismal statistics aside, about 90 percent of Peterson’s classmates do have jobs, and Haag expects that she, too, will have one soon.
Peterson tailors her rsum so it warrants a second look, including her full- and part-time marketing work, the time she put in with the sports marketing department at Colorado State University, when she was a member of the Golden Poms Dance Team, and even her restaurant job.
Each rsum is edited to make sure it contains key words that computer-scanning programs will catch so her application floats to the top.
She trolls the classifieds and online job sites, and makes cold calls, but her best leads have come from friends.
“Most of the better opportunities I have heard about have come from a friend of a friend, or through some type of networking,” she says.
While Peterson pours coffee and clears plates, she quizzes receptive customers about hiring conditions.
She picked up a couple of leads at a DECA business club competition she judged earlier this month at her alma mater, Rampart High School in Colorado Springs. “Now it’s just sitting down and following up on them.”
After months of not hearing back from employers, Peterson has begun to at least get acknowledgements. “One of them was just a heads up letting me know that they’d halted the search process because of the time of year, but it also said, ‘If you have any questions, feel free to call.’ Hearing that is a very nice change.”
She’s also begun to think about leaving Colorado for work. “This is definitely home, but I don’t have a reason not to go anywhere else. I love adventure and will always try something once.”
In the meantime, her black interview suit – bought on sale, before she graduated from Daniels – remains hanging in the closet.
Peterson juggles as many eight-hour shifts as she can get at the restaurant against afternoons spent coaching the pompom team and evenings focused on writing cover letters and customizing her rsum. She’s almost always on the phone networking as she commutes among her Denver home, the restaurant in Englewood and the high school in Highlands Ranch.
Rich Yoke, who owns The Egg & I at Interstate 25 and East Arapahoe Road in Englewood, says he’s glad to have Peterson back on staff but expects she’ll be hired away again soon.
“She’s kind of driven, and I give her a lot of credit for going to graduate school and working here and coaching the pompoms at the high school,” he says. “She’s got enough going for her that if she’s patient, the right thing will come along.”
It’s hard to be patient, though.
Peterson still lives in the same shared student house. During trips to the grocery store, she buys cheap ingredients for things like salads and quesadillas, and she eats a lot of soup. “Going grocery shopping and buying something not on sale, that doesn’t work in my world,” she says. “And I don’t mean just 20 cents off.”
DU’s Wanger says the Denver job market has heated up in the past month, and a national survey suggests the salary picture is improving.
About 66 percent of employers expect to start their new MBA hires at a higher salary than last year’s crop, says Camille Luckenbaugh, research director at the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
“When the dust settles, and the talent pool becomes a little less rich, and there is more competition for people to do the jobs, the salaries in the starting range hopefully will reflect the wonderful trend that we all anticipate happening any day now,” Wanger says.
Peterson says she looks forward to a uniform change.
“I can’t wait to get rid of my server clothes,” she says.
Staff writer Dana Coffield can be reached at 303-820-1954 or dcoffield@denverpost.com
Even a good education doesn’t guarantee a job.
39 percent of student borrowers end their academic career with unmanageable debt – payments greater than 8 percent of monthly income.
Although employers still feel shy about business expansion, after three and a half years of limited hiring, companies nationwide expect to increase hiring by 20 percent. The market for MBAs should increase about 7 percent.
Recent college graduates are staying at first jobs longer than they have since 1992. In 2004, 5.8 percent of new college hires left their jobs, down from 9.6 percent in 2000.
Sources: State Public Interest Research Group; Michigan State University 2004-2005 National College Employment Survey; National Association of Colleges and Employers 2004 Employer Benchmark Survey
Living on the Edge Series:
SUNDAY
Steve and Tiffany Vetos were living the American dream, then he lost his job.
At 95, Dora Hayes has outlived her bank account.
Drought has compromised Dwaine and Margaret Kinnett’s home on the range.
MONDAY
Political refugee Abdeta Shuke was given eight months to learn how to be an American.
TODAY
The final story: Kristy Peterson graduated with an MBA, $40,000 in student loans and no job prospects.
