www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/weekinreview/12lohr.html
STEVE LOHR Published: April 11, 2009 In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.
Enlarge This Image Spencer Platt/Getty Images SECOND THOUGHTS Students visit the New York Stock Exchange on Nov. Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet. Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead. But choosing a career is a guess about the future in which economics is only part of the calculation. Prestige, peer expectations and the climate of public opinion also matter. And early indications suggest new career directions that are tethered less to the dream of an immediate six-figure paycheck on Wall Street than to the demands of a new public agenda to solve the nation's problems. The deep recession has clearly battered industries -- and professions -- whose economics were at risk before the downturn. Law firms are laying off lawyers as never before and questioning the industry's traditional unit of payment, the billable hour. Journalism is reeling from the falloff in advertising and the inability of newspapers and magazines to make a living on the Web. Still, the industry whose troubles are having the greatest impact on the rethinking of careers, especially at the nation's elite universities, is the one at the center of the country's economic downturn -- finance. For years, the hefty paychecks and social status on Wall Street proved irresistible to many of America's brightest young people, but the jobs, money and social respect there are much diminished today.
It's early, but based on graduate school applications this spring, enrollment in undergraduate courses, preliminary job-placement results at schools, and the anecdotal accounts of students and professors, a new pattern of occupational choice seems to be emerging. Public service, government, the sciences and even teaching look to be winners, while fewer shiny, young minds are embarking on careers in finance and business consulting. For the highest-paid business fields, the outlook is for a tempering correction instead of an all-out exodus.
Harvard, for example, about 40 percent of undergraduates in recent years went into the most lucrative corporate arenas like finance and consulting, based on surveys at the school year's end.
Ivy League pipeline to Wall Street in the past considering very different career paths." An economics major, Mr Fisseha says he always assumed he would go into finance, and his summer internship last year was at the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Yet after Wall Street's meltdown, job prospects there have withered.
Teach for America, a nonprofit group that recruits college graduates to teach in hard-to-staff schools for two-year stints. Graduate schools of government and public policy are seeing a surge of applications.
National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration found that 82 percent reported an increase in applications this year, and many saw the largest percentage jumps in several years, or ever. The most-cited reason was the expectation by students that government will be hiring. Still, the appeal of public sector careers extends beyond job openings, say school officials. The laissez-faire presumption that government is not the solution but the problem, dating back to the Reagan era, has been cast aside, they say. The government's need to step in with financial bailouts and recovery programs to steady the economy is seen as the immediate proof, they say, but not the only one. The environment, energy and health care also pose huge, complex challenges.
University of Washington, where applications this year are up 26 percent. Government school officials also point to an Obama effect: his election as an endorsement of government activism. The economy, other long-range policy issues and the new administration, according to David Ellwood, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, add up to a "benevolent perfect storm," which could lure talented people to public service in a way not seen in decades.
His four years in the military included a stint at the State Department in a counterterrorism unit, and he recently returned from 13 months in the field in Iraq.
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