Hard Lesson

Trying times for 1983 M.B.A.s

Vance Bates, 26, had expected 1983 to be kind to graduating Master of Business Administration students. Envious members of last year's M.B.A. crop had advised him that the recession was likely to give way to brighter job prospects this year. But Bates, who will receive his M.B.A. in May and hopes to land a job paying between $25,000 and $30,000 a year, is finding that things seem to have got worse. He has sent letters to 60 employers, and fears that he will have to settle for less than his first choice, commercial banking. Says he: "I never imagined it would be this way. I thought I would be deciding which offer to take, not wondering whether I would get an offer."

Legions of M.B.A. candidates from Boston to Berkeley are wondering the same thing. A record 61,000 students will receive their degrees this year, 26% more than five years ago. The stubborn recession, however, has led many firms to skip the 1983 campus recruiting season, which got under way at numerous schools last week. Result: a student scramble for jobs and a slowdown in salary growth.

Companies will dangle annual paychecks averaging about $26,000 before 1983 graduates, according to the Northwestern University Endicott Report, a nationwide survey. That bait will be only about 4.8% above 1982 offers, however, which were 11.8% higher than in 1981. Observes Gretchen Thompson, career planning and placement director at the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Management: "There is a glut of M.B.A.s on the market. So many no-name schools are turning out M.B.A.s that companies are looking for only the very best students with the best grades from the best schools."

The less-well-known institutions are therefore being hurt the most. Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., normally attracts some 300 corporate recruiters. This year only about 200 firms are expected to interview the school's 2,000 graduate and undergraduate business students. Says Placement Director Glenn Rosenthal: "We're finding a lot of employers canceling appointments that they had scheduled for March. We've tried to be honest with our students about the outlook, and yet at the same time not demoralize them."

Not even the most prestigious schools are exempt from the no-show trend. Harvard Business School, whose 1982 graduates earned salaries ranging from $15,000 to a lofty $85,800, has so far scheduled recruiters from 300 companies for interviews with its 782 graduating M.B.A. candidates. That corporate guest list is 8% smaller than the 1982 version, which was down 5% from the year before. Placement officers at M.l.T.'s Sloan School expect some 150 firms to call, down nearly 15% from the level of two years ago.