As Director of Career Services at Ross, I hope you’ll allow me to shed some light on this discussion.
Having shared preliminary employment and internship data with our peer schools, we see that our students are faring as well as any among our peer schools, and better than most.
What is actually happening at Ross is this: With about 90% of our students reporting their status, we see 78% of the MBA Class of 2009 had a full-time offer as of graduation last week. As for first-years, 77% of intern seekers had an offer as of last week. Yes, those numbers are down from last year, and international students are being hit particularly hard, due to the well-reported issues involving visas and loan programs with which readers of this forum are surely familiar.
There is indeed a limit to what any Career Service Office can do to support students in a recession generally considered to be the worst since the Great Depression. What we have done is this: I, our Career Services staff, and Dean Dolan have made numerous trips to locations throughout the country to speak with recruiters and executives to better understand their needs and to look for opportunities for students now and, importantly, in the future. We wanted to get an honest idea from corporate leaders about when they thought things might turn around for their industries and companies. Additionally, we have asked our leading alumni to step up by posting jobs and by coming to Ann Arbor to conduct mentoring sessions with students. And they HAVE stepped up. And we have seen results. Such efforts generated a significant number of new postings and campus interviews that have yielded both internships and full time positions for our students.
The poster’s assertion that some first year students are “working for free” this summer is absolutely true. In some cases -- based on the specific opportunity that it affords the student for learning, personal commitment and positioning for fall interviewing -- it makes a lot of sense, and we encourage it. This has always been the case at Ross and it reflects the diversity and focus of our students who choose to pursue such options. Far from reflecting a weakness, it represents the strength of our school’s relationships with companies and the resilience of our students. Your ultimate goal is a full-time job. In this environment, it may be that an unpaid internship is the best available means to attain that goal.
So we’ve made every effort to adapt to a situation unprecedented in our lifetime. We will surely look into any “disorganization,” but some of it, no doubt, was due to the fact that we were adapting and applying new techniques (and jumping on planes) rather than following the old playbook as if it were still 2006. That was a mistake that we would not make.
Can we do better? Always. Are we fighting as hard as possible on behalf of our students and seeing a success rate comparable to or better than the other top-ranked schools? I certainly think so. And the data we have suports that conviction.
Al Cotrone
Director, Career Services and Student Affairs
Stephen M. Ross School of Business
University of Michigan
07 May 2009, 12:59
