A shopper's market; economy brightens job picture for professional school graduates

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 23, 1998 by Ronald Roach

Bullock says that while lawyers have gotten more savvy in serving the business needs of a booming economy, low-income urban and rural communities continue to be underserved by the American legal profession. She says Howard law students, while highly sought by top private firms and government agencies, are encouraged to devote some of their time and expertise to helping underserved populations both in school and after graduation.

Business Booming

In today's economy, business school graduates, such as UVA alumnus Burke, can expect to encounter little or no trouble at all securing jobs.

"When the economy is strong, the demand for MBAs is high," says Brian Bell, senior career management consultant at UVA's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration.

At graduation time, 96 percent of the students in the Darden class of 1998 had obtained jobs, according to Bell, who says that corporations are hiring employees with newly minted MBA degrees because they can afford to do so. He says Darden's 1998 graduates will be earning between $75,000 and $100,000 in their first year out of graduate school.

In good times, corporations regard employees with an MBA as a good investment because they bring both pre-MBA work experience and MBA-level business knowledge to the company, Bell says. In down times such as the 1991 recession, however, companies believe they cannot afford to pay new employees the higher entry-level salaries to which people with the MBA degree have become accustomed.

"In slow periods, the MBA has less value," Bell says.

The current hot areas for MBAs are in financial services, management consulting, brand management, and marketing. Students seeking international business opportunities are also finding an abundance of jobs, according to Bell.

Healthy Professionals

The structural shift in American health care has profound implications for students in health professional programs.

Dr. Henry Moses, a dean at the Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee, says that as health care organizations seek to cut patient care costs, they will rely more and more upon primary care physicians to treat patients. Relying less on highly trained and expensive specialists is seen as a management imperative by cost-conscious managed-care professionals, according to Moses.

Moses says Meharry physician graduates, most of whom seek to specialize in primary care fields, are well-situated to eventually obtain positions in managed care organizations. Training physicians to become primary care doctors has long been a priority of historically Black medical schools such as Meharry.

Additionally, an overwhelming number of Meharry physician graduates have been successful at securing their first- and second-choice residencies for postgraduate training.

"Ninety percent of [medical school] graduates got their first or second choice for a residency program," Moses says.

And while Meharry's dental school and Ph.D. students are doing well securing postgraduate training, the school's candidates in the public health masters' program are being heavily recruited by health care maintenance organizations to become administrators.